


Stepfamily

by Sarah1281



Series: Sammy Jo and Donna [1]
Category: Quantum Leap
Genre: Female Friendship, Fix-It, Unconventional Families, but not enough to tag it as thor, old fic, slight crossover with Thor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-03
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 18:46:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 49,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4716641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sarah1281/pseuds/Sarah1281
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Still, she hesitated. "Ziggy…Are you my big sister?" Sammy Jo discovers the truth of her parentage and then there's little chance of keeping it quiet. With Sam still out of contact with them, she still doesn't have a father, just another absent man to think of as one. And Donna thought that she had accepted Sam's relationships with other women but this was something else entirely.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Sammy Jo wasn't entirely sure when it started but it had just been a random thought that she had treated with the proper seriousness it deserved and laughed to herself before moving on. She hadn't been consciously focusing on it and yet somehow it still came back to her from time to time and now she might actually – dare she say it – believe in some of it.

It's hard to remember when it started but it might have been when Will Kinman, her mother's former fiancé and the man who she had always believed fathered her, had met with her.

To be fair, she was already predisposed to dislike him. Her mother had tried to sugarcoat the story all her life, using words like "we had different paths to take" and "he had to follow his dreams" but all it really meant was that the man had gotten her pregnant shortly before their wedding. There was nothing really all that scandalous about that except that he had never actually gone through with the wedding.

Oh, it wasn't his fault the first time the wedding had been called off. There was this kid missing or something and who could think of a wedding when they had to find him? But once the kid had been found, the wedding had never been rescheduled. She didn't know the full story but she did know that Will had left her mother to become an unwed mother while he pursued his dreams of being a novelist out west.

And he had only contacted her last year, a week after her mother's funeral. He had been absent from her entire life and the only pictures she had of him (not that she kept them or even wanted to) were from his books. He certainly didn't attend her mother's funeral.

But afterwards he had called and said that he was in Chicago and asked to meet with her. More out of curiosity and the fact she knew she would never forgive herself for turning this chance down than out of any real desire, she met with him.

He looked…she didn't even know. He looked like an ordinary guy, the kind that she wouldn't have given a second look if she'd passed him on the street. He didn't look that different than his picture, actually, but those were on the cover of book jackets and so somehow seemed a bit more…special. Will Kinman had never made it big as a writer but he had steady employment writing – ironically – romance novels that were reasonably well-liked. Not that the standard for romance novels were all that high.

He had recognized her right away despite the fact that she didn't think that her mother had sent him any pictures. But maybe she had, maybe she was sentimental and had just never mentioned it because she knew that Sammy Jo would never understand.

Will had stood up from his chair so fast that he'd nearly knocked it over and seemed not to notice the stares the other restaurant patrons were giving him.

Sammy Jo, painfully aware of them, smiled awkwardly and hurried over to him, if only because she had a horrible feeling that he'd make a scene following her if she turned around and left.

"You look just like your mother," Will breathed, unable to take his eyes off of her. He was smiling.

"My dead mother," Sammy Jo said offhandedly as she sat down. She already felt like she needed a drink but she ordered a coke – no ice – because she didn't trust herself to stop, not here and not with this man.

That wiped the smile right off of Will's face and perhaps it wasn't very nice but she wasn't feeling very charitable to this man who seemed like he had just been waiting for her mother to die before swooping and…doing whatever it was he planned to do. She still didn't understand.

Will swallowed uncomfortably. "Yes, I heard. I-I'm sorry."

Marie had mentioned, once, that he'd had a stutter, back when she'd still cared for details about her father. Marie didn't give those out often and her mother never did (she might have if Sammy Jo had only asked but how could she bring herself to talk about something that her mother clearly didn't want to?) but it seemed that in the…oh, thirty-three years since Will had left he had managed to work past that. It would have been more noticeable if he hadn't. It was a good thing, too. She had never been a patient person and had no time for stammering. Perhaps it was a good thing her mother had never married him.

"You can't be that sorry; you weren't at the funeral," Sammy Jo said, still in that casual and detached tone she'd chosen to begin this meeting with.

Will looked down. "I didn't think that it would be…appropriate."

"Because of the way you abandoned her when she was pregnant with your child and then never looked back?" Sammy Jo inquired.

Will's hands shook and he placed them on his lap. "I did not aban-that's not what happened. Is that what she told you?" He almost looked angry.

"My mother didn't tell me much of anything," she admitted. "I've had to come to my own conclusions. If you don't like those conclusions, well, you weren't there to influence them. You have your chance now."

"I loved your mother very much," Will said heatedly. "I've loved her since…Oh, I don't even know. She was a great kid, you know, just a few years younger than me. We grew up together and I was the one who got her out of that house when crazy old Leta Aider set it on fire. I was there for her when her father didn't make it out of the building in time. I was one of the only people who never for a second considered that she might have been cursed and I saved her from a goddamn lynch mob!"

That was news to her and she couldn't quite stop the surprise from showing on her face nor the shiver from racing up and down her spine. Leta Aider was the first and only person that she had ever seen die and now every time she thought of death at all she couldn't forget the desperation and hopelessness in that bitter old woman's eyes or the sight of a living, breathing creatures suddenly going still. It's strange how the very air seems to change when a life goes out. Strange and impossible to describe and impossible to forget.

There was malice in that knife, even if it was self-inflicted, and it had taken a miracle to see her family through that. It might not have had to if she had only been able to deal with what had happened and tell someone but she hadn't been able to and her weakness might have cost her mother everything.

"She didn't tell you," Will realized, leaning back in his chair. "All this time and she never told you. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said anything."

"Maybe, maybe not," Sammy Jo said the moment she had found her voice. "But you did and I think I'm entitled to an explanation."

Will eyed her warily. "What do you want to know?"

"Leta Aider…That's the woman that killed herself in my house and set it up to look like Mother had done it. She thought that Mother killed her daughter back when they were both just children even though it turned out that my mentally unstable grandmother had accidentally caused her death and institutionalized herself for it. She believed that my mother killed her husband even though an autopsy proved it was a heart attack. She didn't have a case for Violet's death even if my mother had been involved because she had been a minor at the time and hadn't been able to handle it," Sammy Jo recited, staring at the ceiling. "I knew that Mother had to bring in some fancy retired lawyer who was in terrible health and that everyone thought she was guilty. But what's this about a deliberate arson and a lynch mob?"

Will winced, clearly regretting that he'd said anything at all. It was too late to take it back now, however. "Sammy Jo, if your mother didn't tell you then I'm sure it was for a reason and I don't feel right going against her wishes."

"My mother is dead," Sammy Jo said again. "And I'm not a child anymore so you don't have to worry about 'going against her wishes.' What happened?"

He fixed her with a long, hard look and – evidently convinced that she wouldn't drop it – he nodded. "As you know, Leta fixated on your mother as a cold-blooded murderer or, at the very least, as cursed. It was bad luck that, aside from your grandmother, your mother was the last person to see both Violet and then Leta's husband. At first, Leta didn't think much of the fact that your mother was the last one to see Violet aside from maybe blaming her for fighting with Violet as maybe that had something to do with Violet running off and meeting up with those dogs."

"What changed?" Sammy Jo wondered. "Was it just when Leta's husband died?"

Will shook his head. "No, it was before that although that certainly made it worse. Your grandfather called off the investigation after a few weeks with no luck and Leta couldn't accept that. She thought it was too soon. She would have thought it was too soon every day until they looked in that well and found the body. And maybe it was a little premature but your grandfather was protecting his wife and Leta thought he was protecting his daughter. It wasn't like your grandmother was let off the hook for what she did but she…she wasn't right in the head and prison wasn't the place for her. Even after her confession at your mother's trial, they didn't send her to prison."

"Not everyone even believed her," Sammy Jo recalled.

"No, they didn't," Will agreed. "But it didn't matter because she wasn't truly responsible for her actions if she had done it and if it was Abigail then she was untouchable by law. And then your mother just happened to be there when Leta's husband had his heart attack…It certainly didn't help matters that Leta was absolutely convinced of the insanity in your family."

Everyone had been, as far as Sammy Jo could remember. She had never heard of such a thing personally until Leta's death and then suddenly it was all anyone could talk about. She couldn't remember the details (and she hadn't wanted to hear them in the first place) but apparently her great-grandmother's husband died and she couldn't support her children. She didn't want them to starve to death and so she decided to slit their throats and then her own. The only reason her own grandmother had survived was because she fell out of the bed and so was hidden. The blood had dripped down on Grandmother Laura's head all night like rain.

Well, people were ignorant back then and thought that if your parent was a murderer or crazy or whatever then you had no choice but to be one, too. Even today, people still sometimes wondered but nothing like back then. And then when Laura was institutionalized…well, it was proof, wasn't it? Her mother must be crazy, too, and that's why she killed the Aiders. People had been starting to whisper about her, as well, though Sammy Jo considered herself to be quite sane.

"Leta had started blaming your mother for Violet's death the minute she heard that the investigation had been closed but no one took her seriously," Will continued. "And no one really paid any mind after her husband died because everyone knew that he was a drunk and that it was only a matter of time. Leta decided to take matters into her own hands and lured your mother away from Marie's one night and back to your house while your grandfather was away. I don't know if she was always planning on burning the house down or if she just got tired of your mother's refusal to confess. But your grandfather got home just in time to save your mother before one of the beams collapsed on him and killed him."

Sammy Jo had always known that her grandfather had died in a fire but, somehow, this most important detail had never quite been mentioned. "Why wasn't she arrested after that? Arson is illegal and it would be at least a manslaughter charge since she didn't mean to kill my grandfather. Unless, I guess, the courts thought she was crazy but even then she'd need to be institutionalized like my grandmother."

Will shrugged. "I believed your mother and a lot of other people did, too. But with your father dead it was just your word against hers and she didn't see the fire start. She was just a child, too, and Leta was a grieving mother and widow. There was never enough evidence, either."

That made sense. It was stupid and it caused so much trouble later but it made sense. And if it had happened today, there was no way her mother would have been allowed to live alone with only an employee taking care of her even if that employee had practically raised her as Marie had. Even with the insurance money, Child Services would have done something even if that was to just grant Marie custody.

"And the lynch mob?" Sammy Jo asked.

"It was the day of our wedding," Will said, looking so wistful that it was hard to believe that he had walked away from it all. "I was getting ready and your mother snuck in in her wedding gown even though it was bad luck to see the bride beforehand. The sheriff came in telling us that one of the kids that your mother used to baby-sit, had baby-sat for the night before in fact, had gone missing. Your mother was disappointed, of course, as was I but we called off the wedding to go look. We searched for hours but saw no sign of him. "

"But he was found alive, right?" Sammy Jo asked, just to make sure that she had her facts straight.

Will nodded. "He was, yes, the day after our not-wedding. Unfortunately, Leta – who had never stopped persecuting your mother – spent the entire day riling up the townsfolk. His parents, particularly his mother who knew nothing about him, refused to understand that their son was a lonely seven-year-old with a crush who had run away because he was upset that his baby-sitter was getting married and couldn't understand that she'd be back after the honeymoon. And everyone was so terrified. Things like that just didn't happen there…except for Violet. They wanted something to do, someone to blame and Leta gave that to them."

"And so they formed a fucking lynch mob," Sammy Jo spat out, disgusted.

Will didn't look particularly shocked by her outburst. "I couldn't believe it either," he confided. "I mean, it was 1966! I had hoped we'd be past that but evidently we weren't. Angry townspeople broke into your mother's room that night and grabbed her. They knocked me out and as soon as I woke up I ran out after her. I barely managed to talk them out of hanging her on the spot. If it hadn't been for the support of the sheriff – who they attacked – as well as the father of that child holding a gun on them and my lucky guess as to where the child was then I don't know what would have happened."

But he did, they both did.

"When it looked like they weren't going to kill your mother, Leta had a breakdown that showed everyone just how crazy she was and that did help wake people up. I was getting pretty desperate. I kept swearing that the kid was alive even though I had no idea if that was true or not. I promised that we would turn Abigail over to the state police if he wasn't but that wasn't good enough. Leta believed 'justice' to mean 'death' and crowds always listen to those who shout the loudest. I even promised to give your mother to them if they couldn't find him in five hours, anything to save her life then. It was a miracle that your mother survived the night," Will said, lost in the memories. "Despite the fact that I was supposed to have already married her, I had never realized how in love with your mother I was until I almost lost her forever."

"Then why did you leave?" Sammy Jo demanded. It was a nice story to be sure (well, the parts that didn't make her glad she'd managed to escape Louisiana) but it didn't line up with the facts.

"I had to leave," Will had said, almost wildly. "They had formed a lynch mob! Friends of ours, actual friends of ours and people we had known and liked for years was going to kill your mother because of a boy who turned out to be right where I had said. How could I ever face any of them again knowing that they had the potential to be like those bigots in the Klan? I had to get out of there. And, Sammy Jo…I asked your mother to come with me."

That got her attention. "What?"

"I did!" Will insisted. "I figured that it was a no-brainer. They were never going let her just be normal and they had even tried to kill her. Why stay? What was there for her? But she refused to go. She said that that was her home but that I…" He trailed off and took a deep breath. "She thought that I should go out west."

"I don't understand," Sammy Jo admitted.

Will laughed bitterly. "Neither did I. At first I just thought she was doing the whole martyr thing, trying to either be supportive or get me to change my mind or something. But no, as she explained to me, we felt 'wrong.' She said that she didn't know when the feeling started but when we made love she couldn't ignore it anymore, especially not once she'd had had something better to compare it to."

Sammy Jo fought down the instinctive anger at his words. "Are you saying that my mother cheated on you?"

"She said that she hadn't," Will assured her. "But she couldn't explain what she meant and I certainly didn't understand it. Maybe I could understand if she'd said that years later after she met Michael but this was only a few days after we didn't get married. I tried to argue, to fight for her but she wouldn't let me. And without her there really was nothing left for me there and so I left."

"You could have stayed a part of my life," Sammy Jo said accusingly. She didn't know if any of that was true but he certainly seemed to believe it and it was so long ago now that it didn't even matter. She hadn't needed married parents but having two parents at all would have been nice.

"I could have," Will agreed readily. "I have no excuse for why I didn't except that I was young and angry and stupid. I always meant to reach out but I got so caught up in California that before I knew it, you were all grown up and it was too late."

"But now that Mother is dead it's not too late?" Sammy Jo challenged.

Will winced again. "I…I don't know. I guess I thought that, well, since your mother's…I just didn't want you to be alone."

Sammy Jo knew exactly what he meant but he was a poor substitute for her mother.

He was a perfectly nice guy, she supposed, if you ignored his abandonment of their family which even he did not deny even if he disputed the circumstances behind it. She could certainly believe that her mother had refused to go with him. The only thing that had finally sent their family off to Chicago was Marie's deathbed request when she was thirteen and by then Sammy Jo had so hated that town she had been born into that she couldn't understand why it had taken such drastic measures to free them from its evil influence. Even after Leta's death was proved to be a suicide, there were still whispers. There would always be whispers.

They had actually spoken about it one time, right before she had left for New Mexico.

"So you're going out west," Abigail had said teasingly as she helped her daughter pack. "How very exciting. Of course, most kids go to Hollywood but I think I can live with my daughter working on time travel."

"You know that you're not actually supposed to know that, right?" Sammy Jo asked rhetorically. "So don't tell Michael."

Abigail frowned as she always did whenever Sammy Jo referred to her stepfather by his given name instead of 'father' but she had only even met him when she was thirteen. She was very nice, of course, and she was glad to see her mother so happy but she'd never been able to think of him as her father. Michael, who she suspected never really saw her as a daughter even if he was always very welcoming, had less of a problem than her mother did.

"I won't," Abigail promised. "Do you think that this Dr. Beckett can really pull it off?"

Sammy Jo had shrugged. "Well, I won't know until I get there. From what I've heard, the theories seem sound but it's just such a moneysink that it's not a matter of ever getting results but of getting results before the funding committee runs out of patience and decides it's not worth it."

Abigail had laughed. "Time travel and they think it might not be worth it?"

"You really don't want to see their budget," Sammy Jo had replied simply.

"You know, your grandmother saw Dr. Beckett on TV once before she died," Abigail said thoughtfully. "She was certainly very excited. Kept claiming that he had saved us all or something."

"Maybe he did," Sammy Jo joked. "Time travel, remember. Just because he hasn't built the thing yet doesn't mean he hasn't already used it."

"Do you think you'll have a New Mexican accent before you come back?" Abigail had asked suddenly.

Sammy Jo was puzzled. "I don't see why I would. I mean, I'm twenty-six so that's a bit old to go around switching accents on you. I might get a mild one or something but nothing too noticeable and certainly not quickly. Why?"

"You were thirteen when you came to Chicago and you might as well have been born here for all that anyone can tell that you're actually from Louisiana," Abigail said quietly. Her accent had softened over the years but there was still no doubt that she was a southern girl.

"Yeah, well, that was different," Sammy Jo had said awkwardly.

"Why?" Abigail had asked simply.

Honestly, Sammy Jo was ashamed of where she had come from. Oh, it didn't matter so much that her parents weren't married (and was mattering less and less as time went by) and she could never be ashamed of her mother but she really hated Louisiana. Maybe it wasn't fair to judge the whole state by the one tiny town she had hailed from but it was what she thought of when she thought of Louisiana and that place was terrible.

They had all privately convicted her mother for an accidental death that happened when her mother was eight, a heart attack when her mother was ten, and a suicide years later. Though to be fair, the suicide was supposed to look like a murder. But they never stopped judging everything about them and some days Sammy Jo started to wonder when she'd turn crazy, too. Some of the townspeople had actually started to make predictions on that front. They were all so ignorant and mean and cruel and small-minded and it was a wonder that they had stayed there for as long as they had.

"You know why," Sammy Jo had replied just as simply. "Why did you stay there, Mother? Maybe you couldn't have left when you were a child but when you were older you could have gone away and never looked back. So why didn't you?"

Abigail sighed. "It was my home."

Sammy Jo snorted. "Some home. They hated you."

"I didn't want to run away," Abigail admitted. "I didn't want to give them the satisfaction of running me out of town. I knew that, by and large, they didn't like me but I was not crazy and I would not let them bully me. It was only when Marie made me see what that was doing to you that I knew that none of that was important."

"I just don't understand why you'd stay in a place that made you miserable just to spite people," Sammy Jo told her.

"You'll understand someday," Abigail predicted. "When you've been pushed far enough, you'll understand completely."

"Oh, joy," Sammy Jo had deadpanned and then they'd segued into much safer topics.

There had been so much about her mother that she hadn't known, could never know now.

Was one of those things, she couldn't help wondering, that she was not Will Kinman's child after all?

There was no real reason to think that. She hadn't gotten a DNA test or anything and she looked enough like but it was just…he was a perfectly ordinary man. And her mother, God bless her, was a pretty ordinary – if strong and persecuted – woman.

And Sammy Jo…well, she was not. She had always understood things faster than those around her, even adults, but she'd had the hardest time explaining it to them. Maybe that was why she'd never had any patience, because she was always waiting for others to catch up. The tests said that she was a genius and she even had a photographic memory, a phenomenon so rare that not everyone even believed in it.

And even those who did usually didn't get it. Whenever she forgot something, they always made a big deal about it and asked how she could forget something with her photographic memory. Well, all a photographic memory meant was that she could remember anything she saw if she thought about it. It didn't do her any special favors when it came to her having an appointment and just not thinking about it and so missing it.

Photographic memories didn't have to be inherited and there were only two other people she had ever met who had been blessed with them. One was the man who had saved her mother and taught her to believe in miracles, Larry Stanton, and the other was Dr. Sam Beckett himself, the man they'd spent the last five years trying to bring home. She had never officially met Dr. Beckett but she'd seen him around a few times in the two years they'd worked on the project together before he had disappeared. Quantum Leap had actually started in 1989 but she hadn't been brought in right at the start. She'd heard that he'd come back when he and the Admiral switched places but he was only there for a few hours and so she hadn't seen him in person.

It probably didn't mean anything even if Dr. Beckett wasn't going around constantly leaping in and out of people's lives and making things better. Besides, everyone knew that Dr. Beckett's brain was 'Swiss-cheesed' so maybe he wasn't still capable of remembering everything he saw even in the same leap. But they had called it a miracle when Leta's death was proved an accident. And Will had called it a miracle that they got Abigail out of that burning house just seconds before it killed her father. And then talking down that mob…

Well, miracles could happen even without the aid of Dr. Beckett but how could one person be so lucky without it making you wonder? Most would call it unlikely, surely, with all the death and persecution – and fiancé abandonment – surrounding her but, on the other hand, it could all have easily ended a lot worse. Her mother could have been killed as a child or by that mob or by that small-town jury.

It was ridiculous to think, even if Dr. Beckett had been involved, that he could have possibly actually fathered her. For one thing, he would have only been thirteen at the time even if his forty-something self was what was leaping. She looked about as much like him as she did like Will, she thought, and she had studied his picture very carefully to be sure. They both had very high IQs (though his was miles above hers) and photographic memories…

It wasn't impossible and there were some similarities but it was highly improbable. But if Will was right and her mother had said that she and Will were wrong but she had seen what was right…It wasn't true. It couldn't be.

But just the same, she had been telling herself that for weeks now – increasingly often – and it was starting to become a nuisance. So she figured that, really, the only way to put the whole ridiculous theory to rest was to go up to Ziggy and ask her about it.

Chances were that the Admiral would know, too, but she hadn't really had much to do with him and it would be too awkward to ask one of the higher-ups whether or not his best friend had inadvertently had an extramarital affair that resulted in her when the project's director was Dr. Beckett's wife.

Ziggy, however, was a computer and not particularly sentimental. She also had this strange talent for keeping track of the timelines no matter how much they changed (had Jackie Kennedy really been hit by a stray bullet back in 1963? It seemed incredible). Sammy Jo might not have spoken with Ziggy much, either, but she wouldn't have to see the expression on her face and so it would be easier. Maybe. She hoped.

And now she was standing in front of Ziggy and perhaps it would be better to ask it when there weren't so many people around but, well, ever since Dr. Beckett had lost contact with them there were always people around. She had made her decision and she still agreed with it. Putting it off would only keep her in suspense and wouldn't make this any easier. She lowered her voice, hoping no one else would hear her and especially hoping that this wouldn't get back to Dr. Eleese.

Still, she hesitated. "Ziggy…Are you my big sister?"


	2. Chapter 2

Donna didn't quite understand what's going on. She was only passing by, really, when suddenly one voice cut through the low din and asked quite an absurd question.

Was Ziggy that woman's sister? Did that have some sort of double meaning or something? Was it a joke? How could a computer have a sister, much less a human one? Perhaps one could make the argument that a similar computer to Ziggy or another one built by Sam could by Ziggy's 'sister' but this woman was clearly not a computer.

That wasn't half as strange as what happened next, though.

There was a pregnant pause before Ziggy replied, "Yes. I don't know about your 'big' sister but being your sister at all? Yes I am."

There was absolute silence for once in this room that was never silent.

Donna stepped into the room to get a better look at the woman who would ask that and somehow get a 'yes.'

She recognized her, of course. This was one of the people working to bring Sam home. Of course she was or why else would she be here? Anytime any government people came, she and Al met with them long before they were given a tour and they certainly weren't allowed to wander around alone.

It took her a moment to place the woman, though, as Donna could not be positive that she had ever spoken to her. She must have, though. She and Al – and Sam when he'd still been here – had spoken to everyone on the project when they'd hired them. Normally the three top people working at a project wouldn't have personally hired everyone but they only saw those that had been screened earlier to be sure that they weren't wasting their time and Sam insisted on having the best. Being Sam, he didn't trust that anybody else could identify the best half as well as he could.

What was it? F-something, she thought. Foreman, Fullman…Fuller. That was it. Dr. Samantha Fuller. She'd come to them from somewhere in the Midwest. Chicago, maybe. This hadn't been her first job but she hadn't worked at her previous job for all that long before applying. Donna hadn't been certain but Sam had been hooked the moment she had said 'total recall.' Oh, he still carried out the rest of the interview and he was professional enough but those who knew him knew that that was really just perfunctory.

Why would Dr. Fuller ask Ziggy such a question? Why would Ziggy say yes? She was missing something, she knew. Something that should be obvious but something that she just couldn't let herself think about.

Al arrived then, predictably dressed like a comic book character. How had he heard so quickly? But then he was Al and he always knew if it was something related to Sam. He wouldn't be here looking more worried about her than confused about Dr. Fuller if he didn't know exactly what was going on here. Keeping secrets again, it seemed.

He kept a lot of secrets. Secrets like why he had gone into the imaging chamber one day in a toga with hieroglyphics on it and then been briefly fired – actually fired – for it. Secrets like why he acted like he saw a ghost after he'd emerged from the imaging chamber shortly after getting his job back and for weeks afterwards seemed to expect her to vanish if he looked away for too long. Secrets like why he'd started choking one day when they caught Tina and her husband having a private moment in a corner.

Normally, the secrets didn't matter and were things that she was afraid she might understand if she let herself think about. Now, though…now it looked like things were coming to a head.

"Donna, Dr. Fuller, come with me," Al instructed.

As Donna followed him to his office, she chanced a look at Dr. Fuller. The woman was a decade, maybe a decade and a half younger than she was and she seemed more shocked by this turn of events than anyone. That didn't quite make sense since she was the one who had set this all into motion in the first place.

Did she not expect to get a 'yes'? Why would she ask in the first place if she thought that the answer would be no?

"Dr. Fuller, let's start with you since I think talking with Donna will take longer," Al said. He walked around to the other side of his desk and sat down, gesturing that they should be seated in chairs on the other side of the desk. He sighed. "What I wouldn't give for a brandy right now…"

Al had always been a social drinker, often getting tipsy but never actually drunk at social functions for most of the years that she had known him. Then, just a little while back, he had suddenly decided that alcohol was a problem and hadn't touched a drop since.

Dr. Fuller nodded. "Yes, Admiral."

"You asked Ziggy if she was your big sister, right?" Al asked rhetorically. "How come?"

Dr. Fuller was quiet for a moment before smiling a little wryly. "Honestly, it was because I thought she'd say no."

"If I asked Ziggy if she were my big sister – or even little sister – then I know she'd say no," Al told her. "And it really wouldn't have occurred to me to even ask. Why did you?"

"I had…reason to believe that the man I thought was my father wasn't," Dr. Fuller said delicately, trying not to look too uncomfortable. "And there have been a few miracles in my life, the kind of miracles that we hear happen all the time when Dr. Beckett leaps. And the total recall ability is so rare that I just…"

"That's a pretty big leap to make, from having a few similarities and a few lucky turns to Dr. Beckett having conceived you on a leap," Al said, shaking his head.

There it was. There was that thing she hadn't wanted to think about. It was hard not to realize something when it was spelled out for you like that. Donna couldn't move, could barely breathe. But she wasn't about to go making a scene in front of this girl and it wasn't her fault anyway. She'd have a chance to demand answers from Al soon enough.

Donna wouldn't call herself sex-crazed but she and her husband had had a very healthy sex life before he'd left more than five years ago and she'd been living like a nun ever since. Well, except for that one time but it had been all too brief and that, like everything else about her and their life together, had faded from Sam's mind the moment he stepped back into the Quantum Accelerator. She hated it but what choice did she have? They were doing everything they could to bring him back.

And what was she supposed to do? She still loved him and that's why it hurt so much. She couldn't bear to do something with anybody else while she was married to Sam, the best man she had ever known and the first that didn't want to make her run away.

She didn't want a divorce and she didn't know how she was even supposed to get one if she did with Sam not being present or aware of the court proceedings. Sure, Al could tell him if they ever found him but that probably wouldn't be enough for your average court and Quantum Leap was top secret anyway. And they couldn't find him.

And that wasn't even the worst of it. If it had just been a matter of not being able to locate him then all of these ridiculously qualified and dedicated scientists (they all loved Sam, one way or another. Everyone always had. She was just the one lucky enough to be loved back) would have assuaged her fears. But no, that wasn't the problem. Given enough time, these people would find him. It was only that...that...

They didn't even know if he was alive.

It had only been a few weeks since they'd lost contact with him but who knew how long that was in Sam-time? And who knew how long he could survive without Al there to keep his spirits up and tell him what he was supposed to do and to warn him about the danger around him? It wasn't that Donna didn't have faith in Sam and his five years of miracles but he could be literally anywhere doing anything.

Thank God for Beth. Ever since the very night that Sam had disappeared, she had always been ready and willing to offer her support. She knew what Donna was going through, more or less, because top secret or not there was no way Al was keeping something like this from his wife. And Al had been missing for six years once, thought dead by the world, and yet Beth hadn't given up on him. She could credit a photograph or an angel or whatever she wanted to but the fact remained that she hadn't given up and she'd been right and she'd been rewarded for that.

Beth had believed and look what she had to show for it! Four beautiful daughters, a husband who loved her beyond reason and who had been married to her for thirty-nine years, and a wonderful life. Donna didn't know if she'd have the strength to face such uncertainty, especially since they'd lost Sam, without Beth. If she only knew that one day he'd come home, and maybe even when even if it was years away, then it would be so much easier. But if he never came home then every day she waited was one more day wasted. And if she ever did give up on him then one day he might return to find that she had thrown their love away. She couldn't stand either possibility but, for now, the latter one was worse and what kept her here at Sam's project.

But now there was a child. She knew what that meant but she couldn't…

"I know," Dr. Fuller readily agreed. "And that's why, like I said, I didn't really believe it. But I just couldn't stop thinking about it and Ziggy always knows everything that Dr. Beckett does on his leaps so I thought if I just asked then I could put it to rest once and for all. I didn't expect everyone to hear me."

Al laughed at that. "It doesn't matter how quiet you were or if you had somehow managed to be the only one in the room. People like to gossip and they would have found out somehow."

Dr. Fuller sighed deeply. "I'm sorry. I never meant to-"

"No, of course not," Al interrupted. "But since you know, you're not even going to ask?"

"I think I know, actually," Dr. Fuller admitted. "The man that I thought was my father mentioned saving my mother from a lynch mob once. From what I know of him, that seems rather…uncharacteristically gallant. It would have been around the time I was conceived and that sounds like the sort of thing that Dr. Beckett would be leaped into to fix."

"Your mother was a special case," Al told her. "First Sam leaped into her father right before the fire when it was supposed to kill the two of them. Then he leaped into her fiancé while they were in bed," he looked pointedly at Donna, "and saved her from the lynch mob. And finally, Larry Stanton never would have been able to stand up to his bullying wife to come out of retirement with his health and save your mother."

"Three times," Dr. Fuller whispered. "That's…that doesn't happen."

"I know it doesn't," Al agreed. "And yet, it did."

"What was so special about my mother?" Dr. Fuller asked, still confused. "I mean, I loved her but no one else gets so much intervention."

"None of the other leapees have so much persecution," Al countered. "And Sam did leap back into Jimmy when there was a chance his work would have been undone. And besides, it wasn't just for your mother."

Dr. Fuller understood immediately. "Me?"

"If Sam hadn't saved your mother those first two times you never would have been born and think about what watching your mother be killed by the state at such a young age would have done to you, especially since your saw Leta's suicide," Al continued. "You would have lived but your life would have been shattered and you would have been writing second-rate computer manuals or something instead of here, working to bring Sam home."

"I see," Dr. Fuller said, her face carefully impassive. "Was there anything else, sir?"

"Just one more thing," Al assured her. "You asked if Ziggy was your big sister. You were born in 1967 and we only started working on Ziggy in the late eighties. You had to have known that."

"I did," Dr. Fuller agreed, standing up and heading for the door. She looked back at them. "But Dr. Beckett's only been leaping since 1995 and the timeline didn't change to include me until sometime afterwards."

She shut the door behind her.

Al watched her apprehensively for a moment, waiting for her reaction.

Well she could be just as patient as he could be and she didn't really have a reaction right now to offer him. She wasn't sure how she was feeling besides confused and he had to be able to guess that.

Finally, Al took a deep breath. "Donna-"

"You could have told me," Donna interrupted. There was no point in pretending that he hadn't known since the moment that he left the imaging chamber after saving the mother the second or third time and realized that a Dr. Sam Fuller was working for them when she hadn't been before.

Al understood that and he had the decency not to try to lie to her. "You said that you didn't want to know everything about his leaps."

"I didn't and I don't," Donna said, a little impatiently. "I understand that when he leaps in to keep two people together or set two people up or even just leaping for an unrelated reason into someone that has a girlfriend or a wife that he's going to need to kiss them. And good luck getting two people together if they're not even going to kiss. I know he has to do it or else he'll never accomplish his mission and never leap. But because I'm his wife I don't want to see it or hear about it or even spend much time thinking about it. And that's why I'm glad, sometimes, that Sam can't remember me because if he could then he'd never be able to be romantic with the women he needs to be romantic with."

"Then what's the problem?" Al asked slowly, eyeing her warily.

"This isn't just a case of him kissing that woman's mother, Al!" Donna cried out. "He had a baby with her. A grown-up brilliant baby whose working here at Quantum Leap. I'm going to have to see her every day."

"You didn't see her every day before finding out about her," Al objected.

"No," Donna agreed. "But, see, now I know about her and I'll see her and know whenever we're anywhere near each other. I can't help it."

"I know and I'm sorry," Al said, looking genuinely sorry. "That's how come I didn't want to tell you."

"How did this happen?" Donna wondered. "Sam doesn't believe in sex without love. Do you have any idea how long we had to wait after we started dating until he was absolutely sure that we both loved each other? It wasn't enough for him to love me, no, he had to be confident that I loved him, too. And he made us get tested for STDs first!"

"I know, Donna," Al said tiredly.

"Does he love her, Al?" Donna asked point-blank.

Al looked down. "I doubt he even remembers her. Ziggy doesn't think he remembers Sammy Jo, either."

Donna's laugh sounded more like a sob. "What a prestigious club they're joining then! The women Sam loved and forgot."

"I didn't say that he loved her," Al pointed out.

"Your lack of a denial said it clearly enough," Donna replied quietly. "I doubt he was even there as long as he and I waited. He fell that much in love that quickly? That's not the kind of thing that convinces me that he'd choose me if he could have her."

Al's eyes flashed and he automatically moved to defend his friend. "Donna, you have no idea just what Sam's done out of love for you!"

"Tell me," Donna ordered.

"You know I can't," Al said curtly.

"You can't? Or you won't because you're trying to protect Sam?" Donna challenged.

Al thumped the desk. "Of course I'm trying to protect Sam! Donna, you have no idea the things he's been through since he started leaping! He was so lost and confused when I first found him. He knew his name was Sam and that something was wrong but he didn't know me or the project or even his own last name! He needs all the protection that he can get and if this is the only way that I can help him then I will."

"If you're so eager to protect him then why didn't you protect him from cheating on me?" Donna asked bitterly. "You knew that he didn't know but one day, w-when he comes home, he'll remember and it will kill him. Why didn't you stop him?"

"You think he always listens to me?" Al demanded. "Do you have any idea how many times I've said 'she could be a killer' or 'you're not here for that' or 'don't tell those suspicious government people about those aliens that you saw' or even 'you're a vampire' and he's gone ahead and done what he wanted to anyway? Besides, if he was planning on having sex with someone, how could I possibly stop him without telling him about you? As far as he knows, he's single."

Donna shook her head. "Oh, I don't know! Tell him that he's taking advantage of those women who didn't agree to have sex with Dr. Sam Beckett but with whoever he's supposed to be."

"I know that this is terrible but that one act created this whole other person who is really brilliant and might just help us get Sam back," Al said earnestly.

Donna smiled sadly. "What does that even mean? That Sam should go out and get every woman he's romantically attached to pregnant because it will create so many new wonderful brilliant people?"

"No, of course not," Al said firmly. "But Donna, Sam doesn't sleep with the women that his leapees love. It was just Abigail and, like I told Sammy Jo, he leaped into her fiancé while they were having sex. Sam might have remembered everything about you and your marriage and there still wouldn't have been anything he could do to stop Sammy Jo from coming."

Donna shivered. "That's almost worse, really."

Al frowned. "How so? Sam didn't cheat on you."

Donna nodded. "I know and I-I'm grateful for that. But if he was just leaped in mid-act and forced then that's practically rape – might actually be rape, I don't know – and it could happen again."

"It's only happened the once and that was, well, that was a strange leap," Al said again.

"It's only happened once so far," Donna corrected. "And if it happens again before we even find Sam then even Ziggy won't be able to answer that question. 'Are you my big sister' indeed."

"What are you going to do?" Al asked her quietly.

"Do?" Donna repeated vaguely. "I don't know that there's anything to do."

"Are you going to try to fire Sammy Jo?" Al asked her.

"Fire her?" Donna asked, her brow furrowed. "What for? This isn't anything she's done wrong."

"I know but you'll still have to face her. We would call it transferring anyway," Al explained. "She doesn't know Sam and she doesn't need this project like you do. If you can't stay here while she's here then you know which way we'll go."

"I think that would be an abuse of power," Donna had the presence of mind to tell him.

Al shrugged. "So is refusing to even consider hiring anyone named 'Dirk' but after two of them screwed me over I know better than to trust them."

That distracted her. "Anyone named Dirk? What did a Dirk do to you? Kill your puppy?"

"Oh, I wish," Al said darkly. "Dirk Simon and Dirk Riker are just the worst two men I've ever met and I'm not looking to get a trifecta of evil Dirks."

"I think that Dr. Fuller and I will be able to coexist just fine," Donna assured him.

"If you say so…" Al said doubtfully.

"I do," Donna reiterated with more certainty than she felt. "And I'll let you know if that ever changes."

"You know that this isn't Sam's fault, right?" Al asked pointedly.

Donna sighed. "Yes, yes, I know and I'm sure that by the time Sam does finally get home I'll be well used to the idea of suddenly discovering I have a stepdaughter born when my husband was fourteen. Does anyone else know about this? His family? Her family?"

Al shook his head. "No. Sam only tells the people around those he leaps into who he really is under the direst of circumstances and they rarely believe him. And since right after Sam was drugged and forced to give top secret information about Quantum Leap to shady government nozzles we ran into an evil Quantum Leap with an evil leaper determined to 'set wrong what once went right' we figured it was best to keep the people who know to a minimum."

Donna started. "What?"

"It doesn't matter, it all got sorted," Al said hastily. "I don't believe that Abigail Fuller ever even knew about the project and she died last year. As for Sam's family…Well, Tom is the only one with the clearance to know about it but it wouldn't surprise me if he told Katie and Thelma."

"Me either," Donna agreed.

"But knowing is different from suddenly having to deal with a granddaughter or a niece only fourteen years younger than Sam," Al continued. "And they've missed so much of her life already, how could I tell them and then expect them to stay away? And Sammy Jo didn't know and neither did you so they would have to."

"Why didn't you tell her?" Donna asked curiously. "Aside from the fact you didn't want me to know, of course."

"Aside from that? I guess I never thought it would make her happy," Al replied. "I've only known for the last year or so, right before her mother died. Her mother never married the man she thought fathered her but to find out the truth might have been really upsetting and Sam wasn't here anyway so what was the point? I was going to leave telling her up to Sam when he got back but, well…"

"She's Sam's daughter," Donna said quietly.

Al was looking worried again. "Yeah. What are you going to do about her?"

"You've already asked me that," Donna reminded him.

"And you didn't really answer me," Al countered, undeterred. It wasn't that he couldn't take a hint so much that he often chose not to.

Donna sighed. "I don't see why I have to do anything."

"Avoiding her is a plan of action," Al said pointedly.

"It's not so much avoiding her as not having any reason to seek her out," Donna argued. "Am I supposed to get to know this newfound stepdaughter of mine and try to be friends?"

"It would certainly make things easier on Sam," Al suggested cautiously.

As always, what would make things easier on Sam was at the forefront of Al's mind. It wasn't that he wasn't also concerned about her but he did have his priorities.

"I'm sure it would," Donna acknowledged. "But I just don't know. I'm not feeling up to coming up with a plan right now. And who even knows what she's going to decide to do? If she decides to avoid me then I can't very well makes friends and I'll have a hard time avoiding her if she suddenly wants to talk."

"I think that she'll need some time to process this, too," Al agreed. "She looked almost more shocked about what happened than you did!"

They lapsed into silence. Donna knew that she should get back to work but she couldn't bring herself to leave. And despite how busy Al had been ever since Sam had first stepped into the Quantum Accelerator, really, he showed no signs of being impatient for her to get out of there.

This wasn't Sam's fault and if it happened again then it still wouldn't be Sam's fault. If God or fate or whatever wanted her husband to have brilliant children in the world then there would be more brilliant children in the world. But not her children.

"Sam and I have been married for more than a decade," Donna said at last. "At first, it wasn't any big deal that we didn't have any kids. We knew that we had time and Quantum Leap was just so fascinating and important that neither of us wanted to get distracted. And then, once he was gone…Well, we might never get a chance. Abigail Fuller did and Sam sort of did but he didn't get to raise his daughter and she's too damn old to be his anyway."

"You'll get your chance, Donna," Al said solemnly.

A brief smile. "Will I? Even if Sam comes home one day, I'm not going to have forever. I'm forty-five, Al."

"Lots of women are having children in their forties!" Al exclaimed.

"With difficulty, yes," Donna acknowledged. "What about when I'm fifty? Fifty-five? Sixty?"

"Donna, it's been five years. Sam's been gone for too long already and I'm sure they can't keep him away much longer," Al said confidently. Donna wondered just how much of that confidence was real and how much was just him trying to reassure her. "And you two are going to have a week-long reunion where none of us will even know you're alive and you'll get pregnant. In fact, you'll have ten children!"

"Not all at once, I hope," Donna said dryly, smiling in spite of herself.

"Any way you like it," Al told her.

"I think ten might be a little much," Donna replied.

Al laughed. "You say that now but wait until you meet them. Do you know that I once thought I would never want to be a father? And then later was glad I didn't want it because I figured I'd missed my chance?"

Beth had told her how Al hadn't wanted to drag his kids around the country whenever he got transferred and Donna could certainly understand that argument. If her father hadn't left, she might have been an army brat herself. And then in Vietnam he probably thought he was never going to get out of there and so there really was no way for that dream to happen. But he had been freed and returned from the dead and it had.

"Not everyone can be so lucky," Donna said quietly.

"Maybe not everyone," Al agreed reluctantly. "But you and Sam? Absolutely. Did I ever tell you about the time that Sam made it rain?"

"He leaped into a game show host?" Donna asked, confused.

"No, no, I mean literally made it rain. It wasn't supposed to rain for eight more months but Sam just refused to take no for an answer. And trust me, once you defy nature and history and, well, weather like that then a baby or ten is no problem," Al promised.

Donna wanted so badly to believe him. And maybe she did, just a little. After all, as Sam was so fond of telling her, if you don't believe your dreams will come true then how can they possibly do so?

Sam was coming home.

And she was going to need to find a way to live with Sammy Jo Fuller by the time he did. She didn't want there to be anything standing in the way of the two of them and the family they had always dreamed of.


	3. Chapter 3

Sammy Jo had no idea how she managed to make it through the rest of the day but afterwards Lauren dragged her out to a bar in town. She hadn't actually wanted to go (it was much easier to freak out alone in your house where you didn't have to worry about other people staring at you) but she knew that she didn't have much of a choice. Laruen would either keep pestering her until she came or simply follow her home and it would take more energy than it was worth to stop her. Besides, maybe Lauren would accept the sanctity of them being out in public and not want to talk too much about that top secret project that they were on that wasn't even supposed to exist.

She supposed she could be grateful that only one of her friends from the project had apparently been designated as the one to grill her but Lauren was probably the worst (or best, depending on your perspective) person for the job.

They'd been at the bar for almost twenty minutes and yet not a mention of the day's events had come up. If it had been someone else then Sammy Jo might have thought that the subject wasn't going to come up or that it just wasn't interesting enough to bring up right away. Since it was Lauren, she was clearly being lulled into a false sense of security. Well, it wasn't going to work. But she wasn't going to actually bring up something she didn't want to talk about, either, so she might as well play along.

"All I'm saying," Lauren said, sipping her drink, "is that that bartender won't stop staring at you."

"I hear you," Sammy Jo said pleasantly. "And all I'm saying is that I don't care."

"Why not?" Lauren asked. "He's really cute. If I weren't already married…"

"It's certainly not stopping you from staring," Sammy Jo said, her eyebrows raised.

"Oh, Michael and I have a no no staring policy," Lauren said breezily. She paused and tilted her head. "Or a staring policy, I guess, if you want to get rid of that double negative. It just seems unreasonable to try not to stare if someone gorgeous comes along and so we figured we'd just both be open about it. We do try to keep it to a minimum when we're with each other, though."

That sounded a little weird to her but it seemed to be working for them. "Whatever makes you happy."

"So…the super hot bartender," Lauren said pointedly.

Sammy Jo sighed. "I don't care how good-looking he is; I'm just not interested."

"You're never interested," Lauren complained. Her eyes grew serious as she sat up in her seat. "Sammy Jo, you know that you're my friend and I hope you know that I'm not going to judge you but I just have to ask."

"What?" Sammy Jo asked warily.

"Are you a lesbian?" Lauren asked, sounding almost eager.

"I would love to hear how you managed to get from 'I'm not interested in the bartender' to 'Sammy Jo must be a lesbian'," Sammy Jo said dryly.

" 'Might' not 'must'," Lauren corrected. "And you didn't answer my question."

"Why are you so interested?" Sammy Jo countered.

"Because I really want a gay friend," Lauren said matter-of-factly.

Sammy Jo choked. "You can't just say things like that!"

"Sure I can," Lauren disagreed, looking surprised.

As she had, in fact, just said that Lauren did have a point. "Well you shouldn't."

"Why not?" Lauren asked innocently.

"Because it's…homophobic's not the right word, I think," Sammy Jo said, frustrated. "If it were my race I'd say it was racist or my gender then it'd be sexist but I just don't think there's a proper equivalent. The homosexual equivalent of racist and sexist."

"Gay-ist?" Lauren suggested.

"Fine. I find that gay-ist," Sammy Jo accused.

"You know, you never actually told me if you were a lesbian," Lauren pointed out.

Sammy Jo rolled her eyes. "Well, I'm not. Why did you ask me?"

"You're never interested in any of the guys that I've pointed out to you or tried to fix you up with," Lauren said solemnly.

"Maybe you and I just have wildly different taste in men," Sammy Jo suggested.

"And maybe you've been here for seven years and I've never seen you date anyone," Lauren countered. Sammy Jo could practically see a light bulb going on in her head. Or was it going off? That sounded better but Sammy Jo had never actually heard of a light bulb going off. And why would turning a light off mean that she had an idea anyway? Expressions were weird sometimes. "Are you asexual?"

"No," Sammy Jo said, giving in and rolling her eyes yet again.

"Then how do you explain it?" Lauren asked, honestly curious. "I mean, I've heard of dry spells but seven years. You might want to get a doctor to check you out."

"I'm fine," Sammy Jo said emphatically.

"You know, your biological clock is ticking," Lauren said tactfully.

"I've got seven more years until the romantic comedies assure that I'm hopeless," Sammy Jo said, unconcerned.

"And you've proven that you're more than capable of just wasting seven years," Lauren replied.

"I haven't wasted them!" Sammy Jo protested.

"Romantically, you have," Lauren clarified. "So come on. What gives?"

Sammy Jo hesitated.

"Oh come on," Lauren entreated. "What's going on?"

"You're going to call me a snob," Sammy Jo said slowly.

"Probably," Lauren agreed. "But then, I always do."

"He's a bartender," Sammy Jo explained. "And that would be whatever if I wanted a meaningless fling but I don't and I don't see any point in dating someone I could never be serious about. And I could never be serious about someone I could never marry and I could never marry a bartender."

Lauren laughed. "You're right. You are a total snob. And let me guess, there's no one else in this town that lives up to your lofty standards."

"If my 'lofty standards' keep me single then I have only myself to blame," Sammy Jo said, unapologetically. "And I wouldn't know about anyone in this town, just no one that I've met."

"What about one of the scientists at the project?" Lauren inquired. "That's where I met Mike, after all. With Dr. Beckett and Dr. Elesee married going into the project they were never going to have a no-fraternization rule. And you know that Tina and Gooshie make out all over the place. They think they're discrete but they're really not."

"Well, I did consider it," Sammy Jo admitted. "But what if it doesn't work out? When you're dating in the workplace you always have to consider that possibility and I don't want to create a problem at work because things don't work out. This project is too important to risk me having to leave for whatever reason."

She knew the moment that she said that that she had somehow made a mistake and that this was the opening that Lauren had been waiting for.

"I can see how this would be important to you," Lauren said, seemingly casual. "Since we are trying to retrieve your father and whatnot."

Sammy Jo winced. "Do we have to talk about this?"

"Yes," Lauren said bluntly. "You can't just reveal that your father's only, what, ten years older than you and not expect us to talk about it."

"I believe he's fourteen years older than me, actually," Sammy Jo corrected.

"Either way, it's still too damn young to go around and have babies. I only met your mother a few times but I would really rather not think of her as a child molester. That only leaves one possibility," Lauren said pointedly.

Sammy Jo nodded reluctantly. "Yes, I was conceived on one of Dr. Beckett's leaps."

"What happened?" Lauren asked eagerly.

How much did she really need to know? Well…Honestly, Sammy Jo felt that the answer was 'nothing' but that would clearly not fly.

"On the night before what was supposed to be my mother's wedding, Dr. Beckett leaped into my mother's fiancé while they were having sex," she began.

Lauren laughed. "Kinky."

"Since my mother thought it was her fiancé and Dr. Beckett didn't even plan on having sex at the time, I'd go with 'creepy'," Sammy Jo argued. Particularly since shortly beforehand he'd been playing daddy to her mother. But really, that wasn't anybody's fault. No one but whoever was leaping Sam around…which according to the project's official position was 'God or fate or whatever' despite how unofficial that sounded. And she was definitely not telling Lauren about that.

"You're just saying that because you're being forced to talk about your parents having sex," Lauren theorized.

"Let's move on from that, shall we?" Sammy Jo suggested brightly.

"So why was he even there?" Lauren wondered. "I mean, other to conceive you, of course."

"There's a good chance that that was incidental," Sammy Jo told her.

"Are you sure?" Lauren pressed. "I mean, of all the times to leap in-"

"Anyway," Sammy Jo said loudly, earning some stares from some of the other patrons. She lowered her voice, "A kid that my mother had been babysitting ran away and no one could find him. The local crazy, bitter lady decided to form a lynch mob and Dr. Beckett had to save my mother."

Lauren let out a startled and decidedly unamused laugh. "A lynch mob? Are you serious? But you're not even…in Chicago?"

"Well…I'm actually kind of from Louisiana," Sammy Jo admitted.

Lauren stared at her. "Are you serious?" she asked again.

"I'm not proud to be from a place that would form a lynch mob because a kid ran away from home and was found unharmed a day later," Sammy Jo explained. "So, yeah. Without Dr. Beckett I never would have been born, in more ways than one."

"I find it kind of odd that you're calling your own father 'Dr. Beckett'," Lauren informed her.

"I was calling the man that I thought was my father Will Kinman," Sammy Jo pointed out.

"Also odd but less so," Lauren decided. "Besides, you'd never met him, right? And you knew that he abandoned your mother to have a baby out of wedlock back when people actually used the phrase 'have a baby out of wedlock.' Well, actually I found out that my dad still uses that term when he and my cousin got in a fight about the fact that she had two kids without getting married on purpose. But still, it's weird."

"I haven't seen Dr. Beckett in five years," Sammy Jo protested.

Now it was Lauren's turn to role her eyes. "Well no one has except the Admiral! And Dr. Elesee and Tina and Gooshie and a few others that one time he came back for a few hours."

"And even when he was here, I only knew him for two years and barely even saw him so I'm really not qualified to be on a first-name basis with him," Sammy Jo continued. She had gotten to know him a little when she thought he was a lawyer defending her mother but she had been eleven then! It really didn't count and she still had trouble picturing that kindly old man who insisted on saving her mother despite his failing health with the young and robust Dr. Beckett she had vaguely known.

"The fact that you're his daughter means that you're good to be on a first-name basis with him!" Lauren said as if Sammy Jo were being difficult on purpose. "I know that I would be. Actually, I'd call him 'dad' or at least 'father' but I understand how you might not be there just yet."

"How very thoughtful of you," Sammy Jo said wryly.

"How did you even know that he was your father?" Lauren wondered. "I mean, did you just wake up this morning and decide that the resemblance between you was uncanny? Do you both have some really rare shared genetic feature? What?"

"I…don't know," Sammy Jo said lamely. "We both do have total recall but it was more of a shot in the dark because I didn't want Will Kinman to be my father. It's not that I wanted it to be Dr. Beckett specifically, it was just that total recall is really rare and my mother certainly seemed to be under the impression that Will was my father. Really, it was either Will or a leap."

Lauren laughed. "Oh, I see! Wish fulfillment!"

"I wouldn't put it like that…" Sammy Jo said, a little embarrassed.

"I'm getting the distinct vibe that you're freaking out about this," Lauren noted. "But for the life of me I don't understand why."

"Well, it might have something to do with the fact that my whole life is a lie," Sammy Jo replied.

"Now you're just being melodramatic," Lauren said, shaking her head at the perceived theatrics.

"I'm really not!" Sammy Jo objected.

"Alright," Lauren said with exaggerated patience. "How is your whole life a lie?"

"Dr. Beckett conceived me on a leap," Sammy Jo explained. "Therefore, I couldn't have existed before that leap, right? It was only a few months ago, from what I can tell, and that means that despite the fact that I've been working on the project since before Dr. Beckett leaped, I didn't even exist until afterwards."

"You're making my head spin," Lauren complained. She was quiet as she tried to work it out. She'd have had better luck sober but that wasn't why Lauren went to bars. I had to be sober as some people were expected to drive. "So in the original timeline when Dr. Beckett started leaping, you didn't work here because you hadn't been conceived by Dr. Beckett and your mom yet. But you definitely started working here in 1993. That is a little mind-blowing."

"Maybe you didn't work there then either," Sammy Jo suggested.

Lauren frowned. "Me? Why me?"

Sammy Jo shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe you did work here this whole time. How would you know? How would anyone except the Admiral, if he keeps track of all the employees, and Ziggy?"

Lauren was looking a little uncomfortable. "I think you're putting too much thought into this."

Sammy Jo laughed harshly. "If you think that's too much thought then you really don't want me to really get started."

"No, on second thought, tell me," Lauren said, changing her mind. "I want to know just how much you can overanalyze this."

"All sorts of things change on leaps and we never even notice them," Sammy Jo began. "My existence is one example. Well, what if something happened to change my life or my mother's life or something and I was either never born or never went to work on the project? I could just pop out of existence or one minute be sitting here with you and the next be off living in France or something."

"Come now," Lauren said reassuringly. "What are the odds of Dr. Beckett appearing in your life more than once? Besides, why would he do anything that would make your life worse?"

He had apparently appeared in my mother's life three times. "He wouldn't necessarily be trying to," Sammy Jo told her. "What if making things better involved my mother not getting engaged to the man that Dr. Beckett leaped into so she didn't have to be a single mother? Or what if he leapt to ensure that she moved earlier than she did and saved herself years of persecution and I was never born or had a great life but never came to Quantum Leap?"

"If you had a great life then what's the problem?" Lauren asked, confused.

"I don't want the timeline to change again and have me not notice," Sammy Jo tried to explain. "I've always felt that something wasn't worth doing if you weren't going to remember it. Well, what's the point of my life here and all of the years I've put into this if one day someone could spend a few days changing the past and I just poof out of existence and there's another Sammy Jo doing something else?"

"It would still be you," Lauren claimed.

"Would it? Would it really?" Sammy Jo asked rhetorically. "But even if it was, I'd still rather be this me."

"I think you might be biased," Lauren said pointedly.

Sammy Jo nodded. "You know what? Yes, yes I am biased. And in my highly biased viewpoint, I like my existence just fine and don't want it changed. In fact, how do I even know that in the timeline we started today in, we still came here and started having this conversation? Maybe I came here with Julie and something changed and now you're here instead?"

"You're going to drive yourself crazy with that," Lauren warned.

Sammy Jo laughed. "We deal with time travel. A little crazy's to be expected."

"But what if it was something really and objectively good?" Lauren pressed. "Your mother's car crash, for example. What if Dr. Beckett leapt into that guy who fell asleep at the wheel and didn't hit and kill her?"

Sammy Jo felt like she'd been punched in the gut. "That's not fair."

Lauren shrugged. "I didn't say it was fair. I just want to know how committed you are to your philosophy of continuing to exist as you are with your same past."

Sammy Jo twisted her hair into a rough ponytail and agitatedly ran her fingers through it a few times before she let go of it, thinking. "I don't know."

"Lame answer," Lauren complained.

Sammy Jo held up a hand. "No, hear me out. I don't want my mother to be dead, of course I don't. And even if I said I wouldn't want my past changed even to save her, I still wouldn't want her to be dead. And until I actually find myself in a situation where Dr. Beckett or somebody asks me if I'd like them to save my mother then I can only speculate on what I might do. It's like how everyone says 'oh, well if I were there then I would have done this' but they don't know what they would have really done until they get there."

"So what do you think you'd do?" Lauren demanded. "You're stalling."

"I am not!" Sammy Jo argued. "I just think that, if it came down to that, that I wouldn't want my past changed even then."

Lauren gasped. "How can you even say that?"

"I…" Sammy Jo trailed off, "I just don't want time to rewrite itself around me anymore. There's been too much of that already, even if I'm satisfied with the outcome."

"And if things changed you'd be even more satisfied with the outcome," Lauren pointed out.

Sammy Jo shook her head. "No, the Sammy Jo who never lost her mother would be."

"You know that the fact that you'd keep your own mother dead just to avoid losing some memories makes you a terrible person, right?" Lauren asked rhetorically.

Sammy Jo winced. She didn't feel like a terrible person but when you put it that way… "Add that to my long list of character flaws."

"Why are you freaking out about this so much anyway?" Lauren sounded honestly curious. "I mean, you have to know that the odds of another huge change like you not being born or not working for the project or something is really low, right?"

"Yes but the little things worry me, too, in addition to the fact that at any second ever something could change the timeline and stop me from being where I am now," Sammy Jo replied.

"And any second now you could get run over or stabbed in a bar fight or struck by lightning or choke and die or anything," Lauren said reasonably. "You can't afford to worry about all the what-if's."

"No, I suppose you can't worry about everything that could happen to you," Sammy Jo agreed. "But it's still better to die than to have never existed and, in a way, if things change too much the me that I am right now will have never existed. I think that's worth mourning, even if the me that will exist is better off."

"You wouldn't even know to mourn, though," Lauren pointed out.

"That," Sammy Jo said, waving her hands, "is my point exactly."

Lauren wasn't finished. "You will never have your fears realized, though. Something could change in your life, big or small, for the next five minutes from now until the day that you die and you'd never know. What's the point of worrying when you'll never know that you were right?"

"I can't just stop worrying," Sammy Jo protested. "Say that in the original timeline, maybe even the timeline of when we got off work, this bar burned down last night. Well, we couldn't come here obviously because it's burned down so we go somewhere else. But then Dr. Beckett leaped into somebody and saved the bar so we come here. Which one's real?"

"What do you mean which one's real?" Lauren asked, puzzled. "Both of them are real. One was real until it was changed and then the other became real." She blinked. "Are you questioning how real your own existence is?"

Sammy Jo looked away. "No…"

"Good because that's just stupid," Lauren said decidedly.

"Until a few months ago, I didn't exist, though," Sammy Jo told her.

"Wrong," Lauren said flatly. "Maybe the timeline hadn't included to change you but the timeline changed before you were born and so in this timeline, and any timeline that has been created since then, you've existed."

"It's like that story," Sammy Jo said dreamily. "There's this corporation sending a probe or something to the past and the guy assures the onlookers that nothing will change. We see the probe destroying some things as it lands and then we cut back to the people who sent the probe back. The guy says 'See, I told you that nothing would change.' But now he's some weird octopus thing. He never knew that he, or the person who used to be there, changed even after it happened."

"But what does it matter unless you pop out of existence one day and get replaced by an octopus thing?" Lauren asked, confused.

Sammy Jo shrugged. "Maybe it doesn't. But maybe we'll never know. Maybe we were all octopus creatures before Dr. Beckett started leaping."

Lauren stared at her for a second before calling for another drink. "We'll take a damn cab. You _desperately_ need a drink."

\----

Despite Lauren's best efforts, Sammy Jo was far from wasted (though, to appease Lauren and the bartender, she'd called a cab and would have to inconvenience herself tomorrow getting a cab back to pick up her car) when she got back that night. She was maybe a little buzzed and not nearly ready to go to sleep. She tried to watch some TV but she just couldn't focus.

Eventually, she called Ziggy.

Everyone at the project had a communicator on which they could contact Ziggy or each other if need be although Sammy Jo had never had to use hers before. But she and Ziggy hadn't actually had a chance to communicate besides her asking a question and Ziggy answering and if they were supposed to be sisters (how strange to be sisters with the project's temperamental super computer) then they really should know more about each other. Ziggy probably wouldn't want to but she could at least try, right? It's not like she worked with Ziggy on a regular basis and so would have a lot to lose if Ziggy took offense.

"What do you need, Dr. Fuller?" Ziggy asked promptly.

"It's, um, Sammy Jo," Sammy Jo said, a little awkwardly.

"It is," Ziggy agreed. "I address Dr. Beckett as Dr. Beckett, however, and he built me."

"Hence our relationship," Sammy Jo remarked. "I call him that, too, but you know him better than I do."

There was a silence and Sammy Jo realized that Ziggy was waiting for an answer to her question.

"Oh, I didn't really need anything," she quickly explained. "And I'm sorry to bother you. I just…You're my big sister and I wanted to talk."

There was another silence.

"Why do you call me your 'big' sister?" Ziggy asked finally.

"You remember a time before the timeline changed and I existed," Sammy Jo said, shrugging. "A time before I existed. And if that's not the definition of older then I don't know what is."

The silence stretched on so long that Sammy Jo was beginning to wonder if Ziggy was going to say anything at all or if she had just hung up on her.

"Do you have time to get into a philosophical discussion regarding Shakespeare?" Ziggy asked suddenly.

Well, whatever Sammy Jo had been expecting (not that she knew, really), that was not it. "I…guess so. But I should warn you that I'm not exactly an expert on Shakespeare."

"I am," came the smug reply. "Dr. Beckett had been too busy when he was last here and there hasn't been another opportunity. Why do human beings die for love?"

"I've read…" Sammy Jo counted off on her fingers, "four Shakespeare plays and seen the movies for two more. Of all of those, I think Romeo and Juliet is the best example of that. I mean, maybe Hamlet with Ophelia but that would be more love driving you crazy. And Laertes entered that duel for love, well the vengeance was because of the love, but he didn't intend to die."

"Romeo and Juliet would be fine," Ziggy replied.

"Do you have a theory?" Sammy Jo asked curiously.

"I do," Ziggy confirmed. "Human beings can be idiots."

Sammy Jo let out a startled laugh at the blunt delivery. "I know a lot of people who would agree with you."

"Do you?" Ziggy asked.

"I don't know," Sammy Jo said slowly. "I'm not exactly a romantic so maybe I'm not the best person to ask but since I am the only person here…The fact that they were both so young and knew each other for such a short time is why people think they were just being stupid, I think. But that's not all there is to the story."

"Go on," Ziggy invited.

"There's two forces at play here, I think," Sammy Jo continued. "The first one is a quality of life issue."

"That's a common argument in euthanasia cases," Ziggy reported.

Sammy Jo nodded even though she knew that Ziggy couldn't see her. She didn't know if Ziggy could ever see anything at all but she certainly couldn't see through the communicator. "Some people believe that life is the ultimate good and that there is nothing better than it and no one has any excuse to end their life no matter how awful said life is. I think those are mostly religious types who believe that suicide is a sin but I could be wrong. In fact, it might be the opposite because people who don't believe that there's an afterlife would think that this is all we have and find it incomprehensible that someone would throw it away and just cease to exist any earlier than they had to."

"What do you believe, Dr. Fuller?" Ziggy inquired.

"I want to believe in an afterlife, that's for sure," Sammy Jo told her. "But I don't know. It sounds a little too good to be true, you know what I mean? A little self-indulgent. No one wants to think that they won't exist and I'm no exception so most people just refuse to believe that. And they could be right. I hope they are. I'll either find out that they're right one day or, well, I won't."

"The concept of ceasing to exist is a troubling one," Ziggy agreed. "As a computer, I know that one day this will happen to me no matter what happens to humans."

"Do you believe in a human afterlife, Ziggy?" Sammy Jo wondered.

"I am uncertain," Ziggy replied. "It does not seem logical that once people die they would have their essence, though not their bodies, live in a magical place separate from this world. And I do not trust accounts of miracles or other godly proof from centuries ago. But it also does not seem logical that almost every culture in the world would have some form of an afterlife. It does not seem logical that anyone living would have the answer and so I cannot come to a logical conclusion myself."

"You don't want to be wrong," Sammy Jo said, smiling despite herself.

"No one wants to be wrong and certainly not me," Ziggy agreed. "With the impossible predictions I am constantly asked to make, I'm afraid that I cannot avoid being wrong on occasion, particularly when I am not given sufficient data to analyze. Though I will never know the answer myself, I'd like to avoid the risks of being wrong again by speculating on such an unknowable matter."

Sammy Jo. "I've got to remember that one the next time someone tries to draw me into a religious discussion."

"You were discussing quality of life," Ziggy reminded her.

Sammy Jo nodded. "Right, I was. Well, some people believe that when your life gets to be a certain level of terrible then it is no longer worth living. The problem here is that it seems awfully judgmental. What if you decide that someone who is completely paralyzed and can only blink at you deserves to get euthanized if they want to because their life isn't worth living but then someone else with that same condition feels that there life is worth living? Are you telling them that their life isn't worth it? It's easy to offend people."

"It is so easy to offend human beings," Ziggy echoed. "Sometimes the bigger challenge is not offending them."

"Definitely," Sammy Jo agreed. "And then it's hard to know, especially since we don't know what comes after, just what counts as 'worse than death.' Maybe it's being severely tortured. Euthanasia proponents say that people who are dying slow and painful deaths from a terminal disease with no hope of surviving would count in the quality of life issue."

"How is this related to Romeo and Juliet?" Ziggy inquired. "Was one of them ill?"

"No," Sammy Jo replied. "But that's related back to your initial question of why people die for love. They look at the world and decide that their life simply is not worth living without the person that they loved. Maybe the person that they loved died themselves or they cannot be together for whatever reason. Maybe they'll both kill themselves. They look at their quality of life and believe that it is not enough. Of course, impulse or some sort of mental or emotional problem like depression might play a role in this as well. I don't agree with it but some people believe that love is more important than anything and won't live without it."

"But they could find someone new," Ziggy protested. "This isn't logical."

"Human beings often aren't," Sammy Jo said simply.

"I've noticed," Ziggy said dryly.

"The other one is impulse and the ferocity of sudden grief," Sammy Jo told her. "Romeo killed himself just a few hours after he first heard that Juliet was dead and right after he first saw her. And poor Juliet killed herself moments after seeing Romeo's corpse. If they had, I don't know, been put on suicide watch and made to live or something then in time the grief would have faded into something bearable and they would have been able to move on. Time heals and whatnot."

"I think I understand," Ziggy replied. "Human beings have imperfect memories and as time passes they begin to forget."

"Not just that," Sammy Jo added, "but people cannot sustain an intense emotion indefinitely. Maybe it can flare up again at certain stimulus, say whenever Juliet heard Romeo's name she'd be an intense sadness. But over time, she'd become used to living with the grief and used to Romeo being dead and find it easier to move on, even if she didn't want to. People are quite resilient, you know."

"Since human beings are so fragile and short-lived, it is good that they are since they have so little else," Ziggy declared.

"We are," Sammy agreed quietly. "And we're so malleable, too. One single act, years in the past, and everything changes. And we never noticed."

"You noticed," Ziggy pointed out.

Sammy Jo shrugged. "It was just a guess. And I didn't really think it was true either. But now I know that it is. But you…you remember everything, don't you?"

"I believe that I do," Ziggy replied. "I even remember being called Alpha once. But then, human beings also believe that they remember everything so who can say?"

"You remember more than we do, certainly. You remember the times before and after Dr. Beckett changes things in his leaps," Sammy Jo continued.

"I do," Ziggy confirmed. "And, though it is harder to detect since we've lost contact with Dr. Beckett, I've detected more recent changes as well."

"Since you can tell and I can't…It would drive most people mad if Lauren's any indication but…" Sammy Jo trailed off, started again. "If there are any major changes to the world, say somebody else wins the presidency or something, or something relating to me changes…Would you tell me about it?"

"Why would you want to know?" Ziggy asked her.

"Because it happened," Sammy Jo replied. "It changed. And it matters." She smiled wryly. "And anyway, how are we to appreciate Dr. Beckett's good work if for all we know he kept leaping into situations that never needed fixing?"

There was a pause.

"Yes, Dr. Fuller, I believe that I can comply with your request."


	4. Chapter 4

As the head of the project, Donna technically didn't have to be at work any time when she didn't have a meeting but she came in every day anyway. She knew that her presence was unlikely to make the difference between finding Sam (and then eventually bringing him home but they had to find him first) or not finding him – not like Al's probably would – but he was her husband and her responsibility and so she came in anyway. She didn't know if she could deal with not being on top of every effort to locate him.

There had been some times in the past when it hadn't been easy to locate Sam or they had been blocked or something but at least then they only had forty-some years to look through. Now, though…Now Sam could be literally anywhere at any time doing anything. He might be so far in the past that their information wouldn't even be able to help him (like when he had leapt into his ancestor) or in the future and there was no information available. And what if that evil leaper project was still after him? Just because that one girl had been freed and the evil observer had been killed didn't mean that…

But she was doing it again. She always did that, built up her worries in her head until she couldn't stand them and then ran away. She always ran away. She had even run away with Sam but he had helped her figure out how to run away and to other people. She had used to run to him but that hadn't been an option now for the last five years and so she did the next best thing.

Donna ran to Beth.

Beth was probably a better choice for this than even Sam would have been had he been here (never mind that if Sam were here then she wouldn't need any sort of comforting). Donna's husband had been missing for five years and Beth's had for six. And even if Al had been home now for…what was it? Twenty-seven years, she believed, there was no way that she would ever be able to really forget it. Donna knew that there was definitely no way that she would ever be able to forget, even if Sam came home tomorrow.

She wondered when it was that she had stopped expecting that Sam would be home tomorrow. It was easier by far to not have her heart broken anew every day that he failed to come home to her but it also felt traitorous, like she was giving up on him. But she could never do that.

Beth must have heard her drive up as she had the door opened before Donna could even knock. She didn't look surprised to see her so Al must have called and explained what had happened. Good, that meant that she only needed to worry about explaining the important parts and not trying to tell a coherent narrative. Had she known before?

Beth gently led her into the living room and handed her a cup of tea. Beth always gave people tea when they were upset, even Donna, although Beth knew that Donna didn't actually care for tea and thought it just tasted like warm flavored water and who drank tea outside of Britain anyway? Beth insisted that it was supposed to be soothing and so it didn't matter if Donna didn't like it. Their arguments about the drink were never when there was actual tea around since whenever Beth had to break out the tea, Donna was in no state to argue.

Donna took a sip. It still tasted disgusting but she didn't even care. She tried to imagine that it was soothing her. Maybe if she convinced herself then it would really work.

Beth said nothing, just looked at her and waited for her to say something.

Donna appreciated not being asked a bunch of questions or being pressed to explain but somehow the silence always made her feel obligated to open up. She knew that Beth would be fine with sitting in silence with her all night if she had to but Donna was always worried about making Beth feel uncomfortable by not being able to help her and so she tried to contribute at least a little.

"I think I have a stepdaughter," Donna said abruptly, her voice sounding unnaturally loud to her and ringing in the silence.

"Sammy Jo," Beth replied.

Donna nodded. "Did you know?"

Beth shook her head. "Not until Al called me this afternoon. He thought you might need someone and would be too mad at him to let him help."

Donna shook her head. "It's not anger, exactly. I didn't want to find out like this but I don't think I'd be happy about it no matter how I found out. And it's not his fault that it happened or Sam's fault and I just…this whole situation is ridiculous."

"It is," Beth agreed. "She's not that much younger than you and your husband."

"He's right that I wouldn't want to talk to him, though," Donna admitted. "When he was explaining earlier he couldn't stop defending Sam long enough to let me just be upset."

"Al's always been good at telling when people don't want to talk to him," Beth told her. "He doesn't always listen but he knows. And don't worry, I'm not going to defend Sam because you already understand and I'm not going to defend Al for defending Sam because that would make this too convoluted."

A brief smile appeared on Donna's face despite herself. "And God knows we already have more than enough of that. I never thought I'd be a stepmother. I mean, Sam didn't have children when we met – except in the new timeline I guess he did – and I wouldn't have wanted the responsibility of taking care of a child from the start of our relationship or in having to be extra careful to not hurt that child while dating their father."

"A lot of people don't want to be stepparents," Beth said reasonably. "That's why it's harder for people with children to have a relationship."

"It just seems so selfish, to write off everyone with children already," Donna said uncertainly. "Not that I'm looking but even back then."

"It's not selfish," Beth said firmly. "And even if it were, selfish doesn't always have to be bad. It just means looking out for yourself and when it comes to deciding to be in a relationship with someone you have every right to be 'selfish' and only do it if it's what you want. Any reason you could possibly have for not wanting to be in a relationship, whether it's not wanting to be a stepmother, hating his friends, or even just not liking the way he smells is perfectly fine and you shouldn't have to justify it."

"I didn't really have a choice about being a stepmother," Donna said wistfully.

"No, you didn't," Beth agreed. "But Sam didn't know. He didn't lie to you."

"Al said that Sam didn't have a choice about being a father either," Donna told her. "And since Sam was married to me when he conceived her, even if it was years before we was old enough to be married, then I needed that."

Beth nodded encouragingly.

"I know that he doesn't remember me and it was my choice not to have Al tell him however many times it takes to make it stick," Donna continued, feeling a little defensive suddenly but not sure why. Beth wasn't judging her. "But I guess part of me hopes that he'll remember me enough not to have sex with someone else. And this wasn't his fault. As far as I know, he's never had sex with anyone on a leap other than Abigail Fuller."

"Have you asked Al?" Beth inquired.

Donna shook her head and smiled ruefully. "I'm a little afraid to. And I don't know if he would even admit it to me. I'm happier believing that it didn't happen regardless of the truth and Sam always comes first. Of course, there's a good chance that Sam will one day tell me everything anyway. Does it ever bother you how devoted Al is to Sam?"

Beth shook her head. "No, never. I always liked Sam a lot."

"So did everybody," Donna said wryly.

"And yet he chose you," Beth pointed out. "And when he remembered you he still adored you despite all those other women he had a chance to meet."

"There is that," Donna agreed. "Although he said that all those leaps were blurring together."

"Maybe they'll blur again when he returns," Beth suggested. She always spoke with such certainty of the dubious fact that he would one day come back. "Did it ever bother you how devoted to Al Sam was?"

Donna shook her head. "No, I thought it was good for him. But then, Al's never needed Sam or needed protection half as much as Sam has since this whole mess started."

"Not since Al and Sam met, no," Beth agreed distantly.

Vietnam, of course. She didn't say that, though. She didn't have to.

Tears were brimming in her eyes. "I want Sam back."

Beth moved to her side and started rubbing her back. "I know, honey, I know."

Donna wasn't quite sure how long they stayed like that but, between the tea and Beth's gentle reassurances, eventually Donna was able to pull herself together.

"I'm sorry, I-" she began awkwardly.

"I've done my share of crying on people, trust me," Beth told her. "In fact, you're a step up from me because I spent the entire night crying on a man who was almost a complete stranger once."

"Really?" Donna asked, grateful for the change of subject.

"It was two years or so after Al had been declared MIA and it was a low point for me," Beth explained. "It's hard when he's not even listed as a POW and everybody in your life keeps telling you that he's dead and that it's not healthy to pretend otherwise. And then there was this patient, a guy who was so like Al that it was scary. And I thought that if anyone could beat the odds…It was meant to reassure me. I thought he really would pull through and that that would give me the strength to keep waiting for Al. But he didn't make it and I…that weekend was the most difficult weekend of my entire life. It was even harder than those first few days I learned that Al was missing because when it had just happened everyone was so much more optimistic that he'd be found, one way or the other. Afterwards…well no one ever found Amelia Earhart but they're pretty sure she's dad by now."

"That was sixty years ago," Donna pointed out. "We get to sixty year since Elvis died and people might accept that, too. There was actually a body!"

"I wouldn't count on it," Beth said dryly. "I know that I'll never believe it."

"So how did the strange man end up keeping you company that night?" Donna inquired.

"Jake was really strange," Beth said, leaning back. "I thought he was crazy at first. I got a flat tire and that was just the cherry on top of a terrible day and I was crying, I think, and then this guy stopped by and offered to change my tire for me."

"Jake?" Donna asked.

Beth shook her head. "No, Dirk. Dirk…Simon, I think."

"Al doesn't trust people named Dirk," Donna told her.

Beth laughed. "Al has always had great instincts. He was trying to seduce me, I think. He was charming, certainly, but he wasn't Calavicci charming."

"There is only one Al," Donna agreed.

"Jake and his partner showed up – they were cops – and separated us. Jake was asking me a lot of questions about Dirk and making me think they were investigating him while he changed my tire. I've never actually had people fight over changing my tire before. Al hates changing tires so I think he'd just let whoever wanted to do it," Beth continued.

"Unless, of course, their name was Dirk," Donna remarked.

Beth smiled. "Unless their name was Dirk. Then when Dirk was leaving, he gave me his card. It turned out that he was a lawyer and had been under the impression that I was being investigated."

Donna frowned. "So which of you was being investigated? And were they pretending that the other one was the subject to the real suspect to get them to let down their guard or something?"

Beth rolled her eyes playfully. "No, Jake later told me that he saw me standing there and liked me so he was trying to hit on me."

"How classy," Donna said dryly.

"That's what I thought," Beth agreed. "But he really respected the sanctity of marriage. He didn't seem to think that Al was dead even after I told him that it had been two years. He apologized for even accidentally trying something with a married woman and it was…nice. Nice to find someone who shared my belief that Al was alive. And, that weekend, I his faith was stronger than mine and he had never even met him! He came back to my house and stayed with me all night. And I know that being there for someone when they're crying and can't talk about it all night is a big sacrifice for anyone, let alone someone that had just met you and had initially just been interested in you. Jake was a good guy."

"He sounds like a good guy," Donna replied. "That sounds like the kind of thing that Sam would do."

"Sam's a good guy, too," Beth told her. "That's why he built Quantum Leap in the first place."

"He wanted to save the world," Donna said fondly. "I would never tell him this, of course, but I never quite thought he could manage anything so…grandiose. He might be able to change some things but saving the world? Really? That sounds like a comic book or some action movie."

"Maybe he's already saved the world," Beth suggested. "You'd have to ask Al."

"If we give him the idea that Sam saved the world then he will run with it," Donna pointed out.

"I might have to ask him myself some day," Beth said thoughtfully. "It should be quite a story. And some of it may even be true."

"How did you do it?" Donna asked abruptly.

Beth's brow furrowed. "Do wh-"

"How did you wait for Al for so long? I know that he always says it was five years but I know that it was closer to six. And you didn't even know if he was alive. No one knew. You said that everyone thought he was dead. How did you do it?" Donna asked, hoping she didn't sound half as desperate as she felt but knowing that it was probably a lost cause. It didn't matter that much. Beth had been there and she would know exactly the desperation that she was feeling right now.

Beth was quiet for a long time.

"I waited because I didn't have a choice," she said at last. "He was gone and no one knew what happened and so I couldn't help waiting. And since they didn't find a body I believed that he was alive although, over time, that belief was slowly fading. But I never would have had him declared dead unless I had met someone unless and wanted a relationship with him."

"And you never did," Donna concluded. "But I guess you weren't really looking, were you?"

"I wasn't, no," Beth agreed, her eyes sad. "But that was one of the most difficult periods of my life and I kept running into Dirk everywhere I went. I even met his mother!"

"Sounds like a stalker," Donna opined.

"It almost seemed like that," Beth agreed. "But he wasn't. And he was so clear about what he wanted. If it hadn't been for…well, I might have done it. It was months before he accepted that I wasn't going to change my mind."

"If it wasn't for what?" Donna asked curiously.

"Jake showed up a couple of days after we met. Dirk was at my house but Jake chased him off. Jake was going to take me out. Being with him was safer than being with Dirk because I knew that, no matter what he might have wanted, he refused to pursue anything more than friendship with a married woman. But then he abruptly left and I never saw him again. I guess he didn't think that he could be friends with someone he liked after all or something," Beth mused.

"That's awful," Donna said sympathetically.

"I just sat at home, thinking and worrying. I put on Al and my song – 'Georgia on My Mind' – and I was dancing around the room, imagining that he was there with me. I almost felt his presence, almost heard his voice. He wanted me to wait for him," Beth continued. "But I didn't know if I could. I was crying and all of a sudden I realized that someone was in the house with me."

Donna's eyes widened. "What? Was it a burglar or something?"

"It was an angel," Beth said dreamily.

"An angel," Donna repeated. Beth had cited an angel being what saved her marriage during Al's long years of captivity many times over the years but Donna had never believed in such things.

"You don't believe me," Beth noticed. She didn't sound upset.

Donna tried to deny it anyway. "No, I-"

"It's alright," Beth interrupted. "I didn't believe myself until it happened to me."

"What happened?" Donna asked. She'd never actually gotten the full story before.

"He must have seen that I was freaked out because promised that he wasn't going to hurt me. He knew my name and said that he was a friend of Al's before asking if we could sit down," Beth told her. "When we did, he said that he was going to tell me a story but that he was going to start at the ending. The story would have a happy ending, he assured me, but only if I believed."

"He told you Al was alive," Donna realized.

Beth smiled the most beautiful smile. "He told me that Al was alive and that he was coming home to me. And then…he started glowing, all blue and electric. And then he just vanished right in front of me. I don't know if I would have believed just any old friend of Al's, however much I wanted to. After all, even if he somehow knew that Al was alive, how could he promise that he'd make it home? But when he disappeared…I knew. I knew that I had seen an angel."

Something was tugging at Donna's memory. Something from back just after they had briefly reestablished contact with Sam but he had been talking crazy and so Al, much disturbed, had left in order to try and figure out what was going on and get a second opinion. But by the time he had come back, Sam was gone and they hadn't found him again. She knew that Al blamed himself for that, for not staying and keeping an eye on Sam and trying to help him from there. She couldn't blame him, though. He had done more than any of them ever could.

"I'm telling you, Donna, I think he was having a breakdown," Al had said. "He was laughing when I mentioned my dead uncle had arthritis and acted like he had met him when I know he hadn't because he was in 1953 and the old man died in 1933. He thought he was a leaper or something, said something about turning blue and tingling with electrical energy."

Donna was staring at Beth in disbelief.

Beth smiled at her. "I always did like Sam."

"It can't be," Donna breathed.

"I knew the first time I saw him and only became more convinced as I got to know him more and heard about his idea to time travel. And when he actually did leap then I knew for sure," Beth told her.

"But you've always been married to Al," Donna protested.

"Yes, I have," Beth said proudly. "Because of him. And don't tell me that the fact that we can't remember any differently makes a difference because we know that Sammy Jo wasn't here before Sam leapt."

She had a point but Donna still couldn't believe it. Sammy Jo Donna had barely noticed and so that was one thing but Beth and Al…she and Sam had known them for years!

"Does Al know about your theory?" Donna asked delicately.

"The night that we lost Sam, he came home and was absolutely shocked to see me standing there," Beth recounted. "He didn't say anything but it was clear that I was the last person he had expected to see standing there. He didn't ask me why I was there or forget about the girls or anything so guess he kept his memories of our life together, too. And that night I told him the story again and he finally knew what I had known for quite some time. Sam saved us both."

"Did it bother Al that Sam had to personally intervene?" Donna wondered. "That pretty much implies that you wouldn't have waited without him."

"I know that I wouldn't have waited without him," Beth told her softly. "I was at the end of my rope and I needed some kind of reassurance. Perhaps if Jake had stayed…but he hadn't. And I don't know how much Al remembers of his life without me but he definitely remembers having one. And he had a long time to come to terms with what I did. He doesn't blame me, especially since I waited for him."

"It's…jarring to think that our lives could have been changed by Sam and we never would have known it," Donna said quietly. "I mean, you did but I also know that it was changed slightly by Sammy Jo's existence. And who even knows if anything else happened?"

"Well, the simplest way would be to ask Al but he might not admit anything," Beth told her. "And you can't ask Sam until he comes back. But tell me, Donna, have you ever had any miracles happen to you?"

Donna leaned her head back as she thought about it. "A few in my time. Meeting Sam, getting him back for a few hours. Those don't really count, though. Maybe…"

"Maybe what?" Beth prompted.

"Back in college, there was this womanizing professor who suddenly took an interest in me," Donna revealed. "Dr. Gerald Bryant."

"That doesn't sound like a miracle," Beth said doubtfully.

"The interest wasn't anything sordid," Donna assured her. "Although it took me awhile to believe that. He kind of freaked me out at first but then…He was an English professor and yet he knew a great deal about quantum physics. He had an idea about time travel. I don't recall it exactly, but I think it was like Sam's. His idea sounded familiar to me when I first heard it, at any rate. And he was determined to take me to meet my father. You know he walked out on the family when I was a little girl. I thought he was crazy but…it was the most romantic thing that anyone had ever done for me. And even when security wouldn't let us go upstairs, he snuck me in and I finally got a chance to see him again after so many years."

"I'm glad," Beth said, putting her hand over Donna's briefly.

"It was the day before he shipped out to Vietnam and he died over there," Donna continued. "But I got to see him before he went. He apologized for leaving me and said that he should have come see me sooner. He held me while I cried and promised me that he had always loved me and that his leaving had nothing to do with me."

"Do you think that that was Sam?" Beth asked curiously.

"I don't know," Donna admitted. "It never occurred to me that he could be but afterwards he went back to being a womanizing pig and didn't know a damn thing about science, let alone quantum physics. He was almost like a different person. And of course Sam, if he remembered me, would want to help me like that. I know he doesn't normally remember me but if he saw me then he might have. I don't remember a life where I didn't meet my father again but, just like with you and Al or Sammy Jo, I wouldn't remember, would I? And that wasn't even the strangest thing."

"There's something stranger than your husband possibly leaping into your professor and reuniting you with your father?" Beth asked, surprised.

"I'm still not sure about that," Donna reminded her. "And I've thought this was odd for years. My father was staying at the Watergate Hotel."

Beth's eyes widened. "You mean when-?"

Donna nodded. "Yes."

"That is strange," Beth agreed.

"Do you think I should wait for him?" Donna asked suddenly.

Beth kept up admirably. "I can't answer that question, Donna. You need to be the one to decide that."

"Would you wait?" Donna asked, undeterred.

"I did wait," Beth admitted. "But then, I had an angel promise me that that was the right choice."

"And for five years I had Al giving me progress reports and letting me know that Sam was alright," Donna countered. "You had two years of being in the dark and I've only had a few weeks."

"You're not thinking of giving up just yet." It wasn't a question and it wasn't an order. It was just something that Beth was sure of.

Donna shook her head. "Of course not. I couldn't stay at Quantum Leap if I did. But I just don't know how long is too long or not long enough."

"In a perfect world, we'd find out the minute that our husbands died and could move on then and only then so we'd never spend years waiting for a dead man or years mourning a man who yet lives," Beth said wistfully.

"I hope that I can be as strong as you were," Donna said quietly.

"You can be," Beth assured her. "Sam's always demanded the best of everything and everyone and he never had a problem with women. And he picked you. He wouldn't have done that if he weren't sure that you had it in you."

"I highly doubt he expected that he'd need to find a wife who could wait for him while he spent years lost in time," Donna said dryly.

Beth shrugged. "You never know. He did always like to plan for everything."

"I think I may not be too far gone yet," Donna admitted. "Part of me is worried that he'll never come home but then another part of me is anxious to get this thing with Sammy Jo resolved before Sam comes home so that his return won't be any harder than it has to be and so I don't have to waste time being upset when I finally have him back."

Beth smiled encouragingly. "That's good! What do you plan on doing about her?"

"I don't recall ever really talking to her. I mean, even after we found out it was Al talking to her and then she left and Al talked to me," Donna explained. "I couldn't even say anything. I'm going to need to get over that. I don't want it to be impossible for her and me to be in the same room. I don't anticipate that there will be much need for us to interact but it has to stop being so damn uncomfortable."

"What's she like?" Beth asked.

"I don't know," Donna admitted. "Very smart, of course. I think she might be quiet but I don't know her well enough to tell. She made a completely wild guess about Sam being her father and I don't know why she thought that. But she was willing to ask even when she didn't know."

"So you're going to try to get to know her?" Beth asked.

Donna hesitated. "It does sound like the most logical plan and it's that or avoiding her forever. Which I could but that doesn't seem very…settled. I just need to be able to make small talk with her if I ever have to go out to dinner with her or see her at a party or something."

"I don't think anybody's expecting a miracle, not even Sam," Beth cautioned her.

"Maybe not but he deserves one after everything he's done for everyone else, even if he wasn't the one who reunited me with my father," Donna told her. "And I'm going to do my best to give him one."

Some of her apprehension must have shown on her face because Beth said, "You don't need to do it all at once. Take as long as you need to and I know that you'll manage it."

Donna nodded her thanks at this vote of confidence. Yes, she would seek out Sammy Jo and try to get to know her better. Just…not tonight. And probably not tomorrow, either.


	5. Chapter 5

It had been a month and a half since Ziggy had promised her that she would let her know about any changes she hadn't noticed in her own life and so far there were two. Her best friend's college roommate hadn't dropped out of high school and her first boyfriend hadn't gotten hit by a car wandering into the street when he was three. Michelle and Rebecca never really hung out and Rebecca was never there when Sammy Jo stopped by the dorm room so she barely knew her. And she had only 'dated' Paul for two weeks and that was back in middle school which most people said didn't even count by the time that they got 'real' boyfriends in high school. He wasn't even her first kiss.

Those weren't really big changes and she knew that – thought she knew that – her life would be pretty much the same with or without those two but they were still changes and thus still bothered her.

What bit of history had been taken from her? Who had been supposed to be her first boyfriend? Did she still date him? Did it mean as little as her little thing with Paul? Was she supposed to have been single then? What had she missed out on because of that? What wasn't supposed to happen? Well, 'supposed to happen' was a strange concept, wasn't it? The original timeline didn't include her at all so that couldn't be what was 'supposed to happen' and all that happened was that a toddler lived (that must have been a short leap, just stopping a kid from running into the street) so maybe this was what was always supposed to happen.

Who was her friend's roommate before? Had they been friends? How much had those little events, the presence of those two people that had not otherwise been in her life, changed? And as far as Ziggy could tell (though it was harder to tell these days since she could only observe the changes and try to guess what had happened), Rebecca wasn't even the one who Dr. Beckett had anything to do with. Apparently one of her high school teachers had originally resigned ten years before then but suddenly hadn't and made a positive impact on a lot of people's lives.

Sammy Jo's position hadn't changed. She didn't want there to be changes in the time stream because then she would change. But changes were continuing to happen and she was continuing not to notice. She didn't want things to change back even though before the change she was fairly certain that she had the same opinion about changes. But maybe she hadn't. Who knew? She'd have to mention to Ziggy her feelings on that and ask to be informed about her present feelings if those ever changed. No matter how much things changed and how good or how bad they were, no matter how much she didn't want them right now she also knew that the future her would never want to change back either.

Fortunately, she often had people to distract her from such thoughts. And she did actually feel better knowing what was changed rather than just wondering what might be different.

Ziggy didn't just call to let her know about timeline changes, either. Apparently there were quite a few philosophical discussions she'd been itching to have and that nobody else seemed up to having with their resident super-computer. Sammy Jo could kind of understand that, actually. It was a little intimidating to argue with someone who could pull up all manner of facts to support their position at an instant and was almost completely incapable of understanding or appreciating an argument based on emotion or sentimentality.

"It just makes sense that sudden, inexplicable changes to one's core self would be seen as a form of mental illness," Ziggy reasoned one day when Sammy Jo's workload was light enough to enable her to participate in a discussion while she waited.

"That is true but I don't think that just anybody could put you in an institution," Sammy Jo argued. "Certainly not any of the poorer folks given how rich Scrooge was. His nephew probably could but he had been lobbying for just such a change for years and so he wouldn't do that. Besides, Scrooge's change made everyone's life far easier so why would they want to risk 'curing' him and having him revert back to the same ass he was originally?"

"That is a compelling point, their own self-interest would cause them to play along even if they did suspect that he was truly mentally ill," Ziggy conceded. "But even should he not be unceremoniously thrown into Bedlam, his tale still has a tragic end."

"I'm still not seeing how Scrooge seeing the error of his ways and becoming a better and happier person, and improving the lives of those around him, is a tragedy," Sammy Jo admitted.

"What was Scrooge doing that was so wrong?" Ziggy inquired. "He was not breaking the law and he was not intentionally hurting people. People were upset because when they did not pay what they were supposed to, he acted perfectly within his rights and evicted them. And if they are upset about the rates that he charges, it is his money and his to lend out at whatever rates he so chooses. If they do not like it then they could go elsewhere or simply live within their means and not borrow money that they cannot afford to pay back."

"You can't be serious," Sammy Jo said, laughing despite herself.

"I am always serious, Dr. Fuller," Ziggy claimed. "In the end, Scrooge gave his money away to people who did not deserve it because he was bullied into it by the fate that unfairly befell his former business partner and his desire to avoid such a fate. Why is Scrooge obligated to give his money to others and let them not pay? If Scrooge doesn't enforce the penalties when people do not pay, what would be the incentive for ever paying?"

Sammy Jo just shook her head. "Tiny Tim would die without Scrooge's help!"

"I fail to see how that is Scrooge's responsibility or he is in any way obligated to do anything about it," Ziggy told her. "Perhaps Bob Cratchit could take out a loan himself."

"Ziggy!" Sammy Jo exclaimed.

"I do not wish for the child to die," Ziggy clarified. "I just do not see where it is fair to make the boy's father's employer the one who needs to fix this."

"You are some kind of sociopath, you know that," Sammy Jo said fondly.

"I do not suffer from remorse, no," Ziggy agreed easily. "That is a failing only the more human computers suffer from. You have a visitor, Dr. Fuller."

Sammy Jo looked up and saw Dr. Elesee standing uncertainly in the doorway. Sammy Jo hadn't spoken to her since…well, actually she hadn't really spoken to her at all, had she? But she hadn't really seen her more than in passing since she had realized the truth about her parentage. What could she want?

"Is now a bad time?" Dr. Elesee asked.

Sammy Jo shook her head. "No, actually, not much is going on right now. That's how Ziggy and I had time to talk about the secret tragedy that is A Christmas Carol. And speaking of…Ziggy-"

"I quite understand," Ziggy assured her. "I feel that we have adequately discussed the matter. Next time I want to discuss the unfortunate implications of It's A Wonderful Life."

"Thanks, Ziggy. I'll think about it," Sammy Jo replied. She frowned. "And by that I mean I will think about the movie, not think about talking about it because that's fine."

"I understood you perfectly, Dr. Fuller," Ziggy told her before falling silent.

Dr. Elesee must have come there for a reason but, since she was there, Sammy Jo had something she wanted to say first. She couldn't quite remember if she'd said it on the day this all started or not but she had really wanted to say it since then. She just hadn't quite been able to approach Dr. Elesee to do so. Now that she was here, however, she could get this out of the way before Dr. Elesee explained why she was here. Hopefully it wouldn't be to yell at her but it had been several weeks and so the odds were good that that was not going to happen.

"I'd just like to apologize again," Sammy Jo said quickly.

Dr. Elesee looked puzzled. "For existing?"

Well, that was either a good sign or a bad sign. She didn't think that Sammy Jo had anything to apologize about or she actually thought that she should apologize for existing.

"No for making this so public," Sammy Jo corrected. There was no need to say what 'this' was. And, though it might be slightly hyperbolic of her, she didn't think that there would ever be a need to explain what 'this' was ever again.

"I understand that you did not do it on purpose and that you would have been hard-pressed to find the room empty," Dr. Elesee said, perfectly composed. "I am a little curious why you did not contact Ziggy on your communicator, however."

Sammy Jo winced. That certainly would have been the best way of going about doing that. And she never would have had to tell anyone else. Of course, she had no idea if she actually would have confronted the Admiral about it if she had a choice. The whole thing had just been very awkward.

"I…actually did not know that the communicators could be used to directly contact Ziggy and not just other members of the project," Sammy Jo admitted reluctantly, wincing. "I had never had occasion to speak to Ziggy before, you see, and so it was only when my friend Lauren asked me that same question that I realized that it could be done. I'm sorry."

Several emotions flickered briefly over Dr. Elesee's face. "You didn't know."

Sammy Jo wondered what she had really wanted to say before settling on that polite, neutral almost non-response. But something told her that asking wasn't going to be a very good idea.

"Do you feel that I should apologize for my existence?" Sammy Jo asked curiously. It really didn't matter but might give her a better idea of where she stood with her stepmother. It was so weird to think that this woman was her stepmother but, like it or not, she was. And, if it was all the same to everyone, Sammy Jo would rather not have anyone legitimately not want her to exist.

"No," Dr. Elesee said immediately. "I'm still coming to terms with this but if there was anyone that I would have thought would need to be held accountable it would be my husband and your mother. You can't blame someone for existing, just the people who created them. And in this case with your mother believing that it was her fiancé and my husband coming in mid-act there isn't really anybody to blame."

"My friend Deanna blames that one guy who called Dr. Beckett and told him that funding would probably be cut if he couldn't prove time travel worked whenever she gets frustrated about our inability to bring him home or even find him," Sammy Jo offered.

Dr. Elesee's face darkened. "I don't know what that man was thinking. Our funding was never in any real danger but Sam just couldn't listen to reason right then." Which man was she talking about?

"I'm sorry," Sammy Jo said again. She seemed to be doing a lot of apologizing to this woman.

"It's not your fault," Dr. Elesee said automatically. "And what's done is done."

"For now," Sammy Jo murmured.

Dr. Elesee looked started. "Pardon?"

"So-" Sammy Jo stopped herself. She really had to stop saying that. "I was just thinking that what's done is done now but another leap and things could change. He is still leaping around out there even if we can't find him."

"Do you really think that any of his leaps could affect us?" Dr. Elesee asked curiously.

"According to Ziggy, a few things have affected me outside the major ones we know about," Sammy Jo replied. "Nothing important but little details."

Dr. Elesee nodded. "Do you speak to Ziggy frequently?"

"Most days, yes," Sammy Jo confirmed. "It's just so easy, you know? I work in the same building that she does and we can contact each other at any time via communicators. I had to give her my typical sleep schedule, though, after she called once at seven."

"You know," Dr. Elesee said wistfully. "I think Sam was still sleeping at seven once during our entire marriage and he had a really bad fever."

Sammy Jo shrugged. "Some of us weren't raised on a farm."

Dr. Elesee looked startled. "How did you-?"

"Nobel winners tend to have a lot of information available about them and Dr. Beckett's growing up on a farm really isn't any deep dark secret," Sammy Jo explained. "Well, I would probably think of it as that but from the interviews he seemed to enjoy it."

"He did," Dr. Elesee confirmed. "Although between us I've always been more comfortable off the farm." She bit her lip. "What do you and Ziggy talk about anyway? I'll confess that I've never had a proper conversation with her."

"Ziggy says that most people haven't," Sammy Jo replied. "They just see her as a computer, albeit a very advanced and histrionic computer, and therefore don't feel the need to converse. She's a pretty good conversationalist if you can get past the fact that she has no empathy or guilt and needs to have emotional motivations explained logically. We mostly have philosophical debates but that's fine because I always like a good debate and while most people will get tired of them after awhile, Ziggy never does. And, best of all, she'll never get any of the facts wrong since she can pull them up in an instant. Although that does mean she knows the source material better than me…"

"I can't even imagine," Dr. Elesee said, shaking her head.

"You caught the tail end of our Christmas Carol one, right?" Sammy Jo asked rhetorically.

"I heard you call her a sociopath," Dr. Elesee countered.

"I meant that in a good way," Sammy Jo claimed. "Or as good a way as that can be meant…"

"That's really not a positive word," Dr. Elesee insisted.

Sammy Jo shrugged. "Yeah, well…She's the only family I've got."

That seemed to surprise the other woman and she took a step back. "Family?"

Sammy Jo smiled wryly. "I did start all of this by asking if Ziggy was my big sister," she reminded her.

"Well, yes, but Sam isn't literally her father, he's just the one who created her and 'father' seemed as good a title as 'creator', I guess," Dr. Elesee told her, a little flustered.

Well it wasn't as if Sammy Jo had thought that Dr. Beckett had somehow spawned a computer baby, possibly with a computer mother.

"She's the closest thing I have to family, though," she said instead, her voice low. "My grandmother died years ago, my godmother died when I was thirteen, and my mother died last year. My stepfather's nice and all but he's never really been family. My grandfather died when my mother was just a child and we didn't have an extended family. There's Dr. Beckett, I suppose, but he's not here and even if he was then I don't even know him well enough to not call him 'Dr. Beckett.'"

"That must be tough," Dr. Elesee said compassionately. Fortunately, she didn't ask for any details about why she didn't have an extended family. Her mother was an only child and there was nothing special about her grandfather being an only child and his parents dying of old age and heart failure. Her mother, though…She really didn't want to get into the story of how her great-grandmother had lost her husband and been afraid of herself and her children starving and so she slit all of her children's throats and then slit her own. Her grandmother had only survived because she had slipped out of bed and so her mother hadn't seen her. Maybe Dr. Elesee would be more enlightened than the people she had grown up with and that her mother had grown up with and not judge her or call her crazy because of something that happened around World War 1 but she had been through too much because of that to want to bring it up now.

"That's why I reached out to Ziggy," she said lightly.

"What happened to your mother?" Dr. Elesee asked gently.

"Drunk driver," Sammy Jo answered shortly.

"I'm sorry," she said apologetically.

Sammy Jo nodded.

"Does Ziggy actually like talking to you?" Dr. Elesee asked abruptly. "Now that I think she wouldn't like talking to you especially, I just never got the impression she was particularly sociable."

"Well, she keeps introducing topics to discuss so I can only assume that she does," Sammy Jo replied. "The first thing she wanted to talk about was Shakespeare and why human beings die for love."

Dr. Elesee emitted a sound that was a half-laugh and half-sob.

"What?" Sammy Jo asked, confused.

"W-when Sam was back," explained Dr. Elesee, "Al leaped into a man who the newspapers said committed suicide with his girlfriend. That wasn't what happened, of course, but Ziggy asked that very same question. Sam recommended that she look in Shakespeare although he warned he didn't have time to get into a philosophical debate. I'm…glad that she finally got a chance to engage in such a debate if it really meant all that much to her."

"I'm glad, too," Sammy Jo said, not quite knowing what else to say. She hadn't set out to do anything all that meaningful for all that she'd gotten the sense that Ziggy appreciated actually getting to really talk to people for a change.

Fortunately, before the atmosphere could get too awkward, Dr. Elesee looked around the lab. "What are you working on? A retrieval program?"

That was what most of the personnel was working on and so it was a decent guess. As the head of the project, Dr. Elesee had access to everything that was being worked on but that didn't mean that she necessarily knew who was doing what off the top of her head. Or maybe she was just being polite and making small talk. Sammy Jo still didn't know why she was even there but how could she possibly ask that without being rude? And being rude to your boss who happens to be your stepmother was just not at all a good idea.

"I was working on that before Dr. Beckett disappeared," Sammy Jo replied. "And I think that it showed promise although it wasn't anywhere near testing phase yet."

Dr. Elesee frowned. "I don't understand. If you thought it showed promise then why didn't you bring it to us so we could try it and, if it failed as you must have suspected that it would do, you could keep working on it? You might have gotten lucky and we could have brought Sam home right then."

Sammy Jo bit her lip. "I started out at only fifteen percent probability and I had managed to get it all the way to twenty-three percent when Dr. Beckett disappeared. I was hoping that I could get it to at least fifty percent before I brought it to everyone's attention but realistically I knew that I would probably hit a roadblock before I got up that high and then tell everybody about it so we could try it and other people could work on it and try to raise the probability. I never thought that we'd lose contact and I would have missed my chance to see if that could bring him home."

Dr. Elesee nodded, reluctantly accepting it. "And you haven't been working on your retrieval program recently?"

"A retrieval program is still important, yes," Sammy Jo replied. "But it won't matter if we have a retrieval program that is guaranteed to bring him home if we can't find him and so I've put that aside in favor or working on something to find him."

"Finding him and reestablishing contact is our top priority," Dr. Elesee said slowly. "But we've been stuck sort of randomly going through time when Ziggy doesn't report a sudden change in the timeline and we try to look for Sam at the period affected but we've yet to find him. And even the two times a leapee has shown up since then they don't know enough about themselves to help us locate Sam. And we can't load Ziggy's memories with all the data on every year. I think one of the two might have even been from the future."

"You want to know how I'm going about trying to locate him," Sammy Jo predicted.

Dr. Elesee nodded. "Exactly. Do you actually have something or are you just grasping at straws like the rest of us?"

"I was still trying to come up with something until I found out about my biological relationship with Dr. Beckett," Sammy Jo revealed.

If Dr. Elesee couldn't stop her wince, it was at least admirably hidden.

"Since Dr. Beckett's body is actually leaping around in time, that's what we need to track and so I thought that DNA might be a good way to do that. I used my own DNA at first but that's only a partial match to his. I went through the matches during the years that Dr. Beckett has been alive and though there were several different distinct matches, using my knowledge of Dr. Beckett's movements and of his leaps I was able to pick out his DNA signature," Sammy Jo continued.

"That might be able to rule out times and places he's never been in but I'm not sure how useful it will be overall," Dr. Elesee told her. "After all, he's lived at least once through every day between the day he was born and the day that he stepped into the accelerator."

Sammy Jo nodded. "Yes and then the days that there's multiple hits it could just be from a leap he's already done. Really, I'll either need a moment of brilliance where I figure out how to get more specific or else we'll have to get lucky and search one of the places Sam has ever been while present him is actually there."

"I don't like those odds," Dr. Elesee said, frowning.

"Honestly, I don't either but it's the best we've got right now," Sammy Jo admitted.

"Have you given this to Gooshie?" Dr. Elesee asked.

Sammy Jo shook her head. "I'm not quite there yet."

Dr. Elesee sighed. "Dr. Fuller-"

Sammy Jo held up her hands. "I know, I know. I can fix it while the original version is used to try to locate Dr. Beckett. But I'm almost to a point where I think that, while improvements can of course always be made, testing it would be worthwhile."

"Get it to them soon," Dr. Elesee ordered.

"Yes, ma'am," Sammy Jo agreed.

The conversation seemed to be over and yet Dr. Elesee lingered. She didn't seem inclined to say anything, however. Rather, she appeared to be trying to make up her mind.

"Was there anything else?" Sammy Jo finally asked politely.

"You don't have any family left on your mother's side, no," Dr. Elesee said slowly. "You do have family on your father's side, however. Seeing Sam right now is completely impossible, of course, but he has plenty of family. I'm not sure if you would be interested in meeting any of them, of course, but you did mention connecting with Ziggy because she's the closest thing you have to family and so I just thought I'd ask."

She hadn't technically asked anything but Sammy Jo got the general gist of it.

"How would you explain about me?" she asked. "I thought that only Dr. Beckett's brother has the clearance to know about the project?"

"Tom would have told Katie, Thelma, and maybe his wife the minute that Sam disappeared," Dr. Elesee said confidently. "And that's if he didn't let them know before. But we wouldn't have to tell them about you. It's probably better that we don't until Sam returns anyway."

"I'm all for that," Sammy Jo said gratefully.

"As it happens, I'm meeting Tom for lunch next week. You're welcome to come along," she invited.

"Won't that be a little suspicious?" Sammy Jo asked uncertainly. She did kind of want to meet a flesh and blood member of her family, especially with no pressure or expectations since he wouldn't even know who she was and might never have to know. "Do you have a cover story?"

"I don't need a cover story," Dr. Elesee assured her. "Tom Beckett brings people we hadn't expected to events all the time and never explains anything. I'm not even sure he even knows them sometimes."

That was certainly…odd.

Dr. Elesee saw the look on her face. "Tom works with the FBI and he really eats up the whole 'top secret' thing. In fact, the past few years he's been claiming to be a member of the men in black."

Sammy Jo laughed. "You're kidding."

Dr. Elesee smiled a little herself. "I only wish that I was kidding. Trust me, any strange or suspicious thing that I do and there's a good chance he'll just write it off as me trying to get him back. You should see some of the things that Al gets up to trying to get even. And just bringing you and introducing you as a colleague won't even begin to make him suspicious. And even if he were suspicious, what's he going to think? That a woman a decade and a half younger than his brother is somehow his niece?"

"You do have a point," Sammy Jo admitted. "For all that it's possible that that's what happened, I don't think it's something that people's minds would automatically jump to."

"So would you like to go?" Dr. Elesee asked again.

Sammy Jo hesitated. "Are you sure that it wouldn't be a problem? It might not be awkward for Dr. Beckett's brother if he doesn't know the truth but I really wouldn't want to make you uncomfortable."

"I'll be fine," Dr. Elesee assured her. "Though I do thank you for your concern."

"Then alright, Dr. Elesee. That sounds like a plan," Sammy Jo told her.

"We're meeting at the restaurant at 12:30 Friday so be in my office ready to go at 11:30," Dr. Elesee instructed.

"I will," Sammy Jo agreed.

After another awkward moment of just standing around, Dr. Elesee coughed and turned to go. "I should let you get back to work."

"Okay," Sammy Jo replied.

Right as she reached the door, Dr. Elesee put her hand on the door frame and turned back to her. "And Dr. Fuller…At the lunch it won't be a business lunch but rather a sister-in-law and a brother-in-law catching up. I think that it would be awkward for you to address me as 'Dr. Elesee' the entire time so please, call me Donna."

"Donna," Sammy Jo said slowly, trying it out. It didn't sound as natural as 'Dr. Elesee' did but by Friday it probably would. "Alright. And feel free to call me Sammy Jo."

"Sammy Jo, then," Dr. El-Donna said agreeably before shutting the door behind her.

This was a good sign, wasn't it? They were now, impossibly, on a first name basis with each other. She wasn't even on a first name basis with her own father. Though, to be fair, she supposed that not a lot of people were. But it wasn't like she called him father or anything. Or rather, she wouldn't if he were actually present.

But even though she had no idea if she even wanted a relationship with the man once he came back (she had to believe that he'd come back for the same reason that everyone else did) since she knew so little about him, she knew that it would just be easier overall if she could be civil with her stepmother.

Civil…that was all anyone could expect, couldn't it?

That conversation hadn't been at all hostile but it had been awkward as hell and she could only imagine how bad Friday would be. Hopefully her apparently eccentric uncle could liven things up a little.


	6. Chapter 6

Donna still wasn't sure if this was a good idea but it was too late to back out of it now. And after all, it was just one lunch. If things went badly or she couldn't handle bringing Sammy Jo any further into Sam's world then working at Project Quantum Leap then that was all it had to be. But she was working on being able to handle Sammy Jo's presence and she thought that she was getting better at it.

She had had practiced looking at Sammy Jo whenever she happened to come across her until she could do so without more than a twinge of discomfort because she didn't think she could progress any further if she was still having issues just looking at her. Of course, first she had to practice being in the same room but she had gotten there.

That first conversation they'd had last week was incredibly awkward and Donna had made sure to stage a few more short conversations with her that had felt just as awkward. Still, she figured that sooner or later the awkwardness would run out and they could carry out a normal conversation if they ever had to.

They hadn't quite made it there yet but Tom hadn't gotten to the restaurant yet and so they could either sit in awkward silence or try to have a less awkward conversation.

Well, Donna had been the one to make the effort all week and so she'd leave it up to Sammy Jo which one they'd do. Of course, it made sense that Donna would be the one to try. The woman barely knew her father so their relationship probably wasn't real to her the way that Donna's relationship to Sam definitely was. She needed to try and make things easier when Sam got home to try and make up for everything he'd been through for so long but Sammy Jo wouldn't feel that same urgency. So she didn't blame her, exactly, but it was a little frustrating to always be the one making the overtures (even if a week or so was a bit premature for calling it "always"). At least she wasn't being shot down. Who knew what she'd end up doing then?

"What should I call him?" Sammy Jo asked. It hadn't been easy to stop thinking of her as Dr. Fuller but she hadn't slipped up at all about calling her Donna so Donna didn't want to mess up, either. And making the effort to think of her as Sammy Jo was only making it easier to call her that when she didn't need to specifically refer to her title. It was always so strange when she had to discuss 'Admiral Calavicci' or 'Dr. Beckett.' "He's FBI so is that 'Agent Beckett' or…?"

"Agent Beckett would be fine," Donna replied. "But I guarantee you that the first time you do that he'll tell you to just call him Tom."

"And it wouldn't be strange because I've never met him before," Sammy Jo said to herself, nodding. "Okay. I feel sort of like a spy or something."

"You do?" Donna asked, surprised. Evidently they were going to be talking while waiting for Sam's brother.

Sammy Jo nodded. "All this talk about how to not appear suspicious…It's like I'm trying to avoid detection or doing something wrong or something."

"Well, you're not doing anything wrong but we are trying to make sure that Tom doesn't realize that you're his niece," Donna replied. "Fortunately, if we do start acting suspiciously then that's not going to be the first thing he thinks of. In fact, he will probably think that you are an actual spy – or an alien if he wasn't kidding about that MIB thing – before he'd suspect the truth."

"Is that a good thing?" Sammy Jo asked uncertainly.

"Well, you're not a spy," Donna pointed out, shrugging. "But listen, don't worry so much. If there's one thing Al's taught me then it's that people with something to hide often try to hard and try too compensate for things that someone with nothing to hide wouldn't concern themselves with."

"The Admiral?" Sammy Jo asked, almost rhetorically. "Is he like an expert or something?"

Donna smiled fondly at that. "Let's just say that he lived a very interesting life before he met his wife and leave it at that. He never does but, well, Beth knew who he was when she married him."

"If you say so," Sammy Jo said uncertainly, still looking a little puzzled.

"I was thinking about what you said last week and I decided to try to have a conversation with Ziggy," Donna announced.

"Oh really?" Sammy Jo looked intrigued. "How did it go?"

"I have no idea," Donna admitted, laughing a little. "She wanted to talk about Back to the Future. It was a little like talking to Sam and Al combined but minus the empathy. And maybe a little Tom thrown in for good measure."

"Did they ever team up on you?" Sammy Jo asked curiously.

Donna thought about it. It had been more than five years now since Sam and Al had even been in the same year. "Sometimes," she decided. "But usually that was when Al and I were arguing about something and Al dragged Sam in as his reluctant support."

"Back to the Future sounds like it would be fun to talk about," Sammy Jo mused, tapping her chin. "I wonder why she's never brought it up with me."

Ziggy had actually explained it to her. Apparently Sammy Jo was always worrying about timeline changes as it was and so the idea of erasing yourself from existence accidentally, and particularly Ziggy's question about it, was probably just going to make it worse. Donna didn't know about that but she knew that Sam would definitely have a hard time with it and so she made Ziggy promise that she wouldn't ask him about it. Donna had no idea if Ziggy actually kept her promises but it was the best that she could do. Hopefully that would never occur to him but, Sam being Sam, it was only a matter of time.

Donna just shrugged noncommittally. "We were talking about the timeline towards the end of the first movie where Marty doesn't manage to get his parents together. Ziggy figured that they probably married other people and had at least one child with them."

"People can get married without having children," Sammy Jo pointed out. "And George was such a loser the first time around that I'm not convinced that he found someone else to marry him. And Lorraine, if the second movie is any indication, probably married Biff."

"That's a possibility, yes," Donna conceded. "But what if that's not it? What if they both got married and had other children? Then Marty restoring the timeline would erase those new children from existence. And if George married A then whatever children A initially had wouldn't exist. And A's original husband might marry B preventing whatever children B originally had. And B's husband would marry C and so on and so on. The same with Lorraine, assuming that Biff ever married someone else in the original timeline."

Sammy Jo frowned. "So Ziggy wanted to know if there would be any moral problems in Marty preventing a lot of potential people from existing by reestablishing the original timeline considering that the alternate timeline would also prevent a lot of people from the original timeline to exist."

Donna nodded. "Exactly. She decided that you could try and look at how many people would exist only in one of the timelines and lean towards the timeline that has more but there were only thirty years that they could work with and you never knew how many descendents would ultimately be had by each timeline. She was also interested in which group of marriages and children were better off than the other but Marty didn't have that information. And we eventually agreed that there was no objective way to measure the morality of the actions because, either way, you were not just killing but stopping a lot of people from ever existing. And we didn't know if more people than Marty and his two siblings were even affected existence-wise assuming Biff wasn't originally married and George didn't marry anybody else. Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that Marty did the right thing for himself because he chose to exist over not exist."

"Some would argue that the original timeline is the best but at Quantum Leap we're operating under the assumption that the reverse is true. Well, as long as things are changed for the better," Sammy Jo qualified.

There had been an evil Quantum Leap once. Al still suspected that the literal devil might have been involved.

"And the whole thing was made more complicated than it had to be since the time travelling rules of Back to the Future are hardly consistent and Ziggy takes personal offense to-" Donna cut off when she caught a glimpse of Tom out of the corner of her eye and, beaming, stood up to greet him.

"Donna!" Tom greeted her warmly, drawing her into a brief hug. He drew back and looked at Sammy Jo, who remained seating but looked unsure about her decision to do so. "And who is this?"

"That's Dr. Samantha Fuller, a colleague of mine from the Project," Donna introduced.

"Sammy Jo, please, Agent Beckett," Sammy Jo told him.

Tom took his seat and Donna did as well.

"Only if you call me Tom," Tom predictably told her, shaking her hand.

"I'm not suspicious," Sammy Jo declared.

Tom smirked. "Oh no, I'm not biting. I got burned for that the last three times."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Donna lied.

"Don't believe a word she says," Tom advised. "Oh good, drinks. Have they been by to take our order yet?"

"They have but we held off on ordering because you always complain when someone else orders for you, even if you always order the same thing," Donna replied.

"We got you some of the complimentary wine but Donna said that it tastes terrible," Sammy Jo told him.

"Free wine always does," Tom said knowingly, taking a sip anyway and making a face. "You didn't try any?"

Sammy Jo shook her head. "Oh, no. I never drink when I have to drive."

"It's only a glass of wine," Donna pointed out. "Your reflexes aren't going to be impacted from that."

"Probably not," Sammy Jo agreed. "But I still feel better when I'm careful."

Tom shrugged. "More terrible wine for me!"

The waitress came by just then and took their order. Tom made sure to order something that he'd never tried before just to prove to Donna that he wasn't that predictable though Donna was sure that he wouldn't end up eating any of it. He really wasn't very adventurous food-wise. It was a wonder how he had made it through Vietnam, really. Or maybe that was where his pickiness came from.

"So how are Kimberly and the kids?" Donna asked him.

Tom frowned. "I don't know."

Donna rolled her eyes. "Really."

"I heard from them two days ago and they were fine then but a lot of things can happen in two days," Tom said seriously. "It's always a pleasant surprise when I return home and find that they weren't abducted by alie-I didn't say that."

"Say what?" Sammy Jo asked innocently. "You said it was always a pleasant surprise when you returned home and found out that they weren't and then I didn't catch that next part."

"They weren't planning on going out and buying me another Billy Bass," Tom claimed.

"They do this a lot?" Sammy Jo asked him. It was such a ridiculous cover-up and they all clearly knew that but Donna, at least, had no intention of calling him on it. She wondered if Sammy Jo would.

Tom laughed and shook his head. "You have no idea."

"They wouldn't have to keep buying them for him if he didn't keep 'accidentally' destroying them in increasingly bizarre and improbable ways," Donna pointed out.

"I would have thought that they'd have gotten the picture by now," Tom grumbled.

"And they're equally baffled that you haven't gotten the picture by now either," Donna retorted. She turned to Sammy Jo. "Did you know that the last Billy Bass that they got him was apparently the victim of a murder-suicide with his garden gnome?"

"What?" Sammy Jo asked incredulously.

"I don't see what's so difficult to believe about that," Tom said stubbornly. "Garden gnomes are evil."

"They're inanimate objects," Donna disagreed.

"Tell that to Toy Story," Tom countered.

"Toy Story was a movie. And I don't think garden gnomes would even count as alive toys then since, you know, they're really not toys," Donna told him.

"Why would a garden gnome even want to kill your Billy Bass and then itself anyway?" Sammy Jo wanted to know.

"I already told you," Tom replied. "It's evil. And just as we have the time-honored cliché that evil cannot understood good, I think we can also trust that good cannot understand evil. Or crazy. And the garden gnome was most assuredly that."

"But if it's so evil and crazy then why did you just leave it lying around to destroy your Billy Bass?" Sammy Jo pressed.

Donna nodded and looked pointedly at him.

"They wouldn't believe me and Jennifer took it out of the trash," Tom said, sighing tragically.

"Jennifer's his youngest daughter," Donna explained. "She's twelve. Caleb's sixteen and Andrea's twenty." Tom's children didn't really bother her since Kimberly was a few years younger than Tom but the fact that Katie's kids were practically grown and she was only two years younger than Donna did.

Sammy Jo looked very interested in this revelation that she had cousins, albeit cousins that were significantly younger than she was. "Is she in college then?"

Tom groaned and winced. "Yes."

"And that's…a bad thing?" Sammy Jo asked uncertainly.

"It is when I see her tuition bill," Tom told her.

And since that really wasn't enough, Donna elaborated, "She's changed her major three times in two years."

"She's talking about changing it again," Tom complained.

"At least she's going somewhere," Donna tried to console him.

"I just wish that her little journey of self-discovery wasn't so damn expensive," Tom said, rubbing his forehead. "I wasn't nearly that complicated."

"Oh, like your parents were thrilled when you decided to go off to Vietnam and get shot at instead," Donna deadpanned.

"It was certainly cheaper," Tom said defiantly. "Unfortunately, Kimberly says that trying to get her to join the military to save on schooling is bad parenting."

"She has written three parenting books," Donna pointed out.

Tom threw his hands up in the air. "Since when does that make you an expert?"

"I would certainly hope that experts are writing parenting books," Sammy Jo said, a little disconcerted.

"It doesn't even matter," Tom confided. "Aside from a few useful tips – like how to hold a baby or what it means when they turn orange – you can't learn parenting from a book."

"Have you stopped calling Andrea your test case yet?" Donna inquired.

"Nope," Tom said cheerfully. "And I have no intention of doing that."

"Hey," Donna said as if she had just gotten an idea. "I've heard all the stories, of course, but why don't you tell Sammy Jo something about Sam? Everyone needs more dirt on their boss. Unless, of course, their boss is me but you know better than to say anything while I'm right here."

"I can't decide if that's a compliment or an insult," Tom said, rubbing his chin.

"Oh, could you?" Sammy Jo asked, her eyes lighting up. "We just kind of know him as this brilliant god-like figure over at the Project and I'm sure that, as his brother, you have an, um, different take on the matter."

Tom laughed. "Brilliant I'll grant you – if only because it's hard to argue with all those PhDs – but god-like?"

"He can change the past," Sammy Jo said simply.

"Well…yeah," Tom admitted. "But let me assure you that he's not very god-like while he does it."

Sammy Jo leaned forward eagerly and even Donna was taken aback at that.

"Did Dr. Beckett leap into your past?" she asked excitedly.

"And if he did then how could you possibly know that?" Donna demanded. Al had told her that Sam had leapt into his sixteen-year-old self once but he hadn't thought that it was a good idea for Donna to see him. He wouldn't have recognized her anyway. Donna half-complied in that she watched him through the monitor but didn't go in the room with him. It would have been too tempting to tell him everything and, even with the fact he wouldn't remember when he got back, there was still too great a chance to risk changing things. Apparently her Sam had already been causing all sorts of complications in his efforts to change his family's future. "Did Al tell you?"

"Al confirmed it," Tom admitted. "But, really, that was only a formality. I knew and that's why Al finally admitted it. And, more to the point, my sister knew."

"There's a story here," Sammy Jo declared.

"Look, all I'm saying is that if we weren't supposed to know that he was a time traveler then maybe he shouldn't have told us all 'I'm actually from the future and Dad's going to die of a heart attack and you're going to be killed on April 8th, 1970. Oh, and Katie's going to marry an abusive alcoholic named Chuck. Want to see me play 'Imagine'?' It was 1969!" Tom exclaimed.

"That would probably make me suspicious, too," Donna conceded. He had never claimed to be from the future when he leaped into her life (well, near her life) but then she still didn't know if that was even him. "He's usually more subtle than that."

Tom shrugged. "Well, he didn't want me to die and he saw that as his one chance to stop that. And if he could stop Katie and Dad's futures from turning bad then you know he'd want to do that."

"Did he succeed?" Sammy Jo wondered.

Tom shrugged again. "Dad still died and I have no idea if he died earlier or later then he did originally or right at the same time. I can't imagine why Sam trying to warn him would shorten his life, though. Katie didn't marry Chuck even though one time she told me that she was dating somebody by that name. She was a little wary because 'Imagine' hadn't come out when Sam played it so she was wondering if he was from the future. And I, of course, am not dead. But that might have been Sam again," he said thoughtfully.

"Again?" Donna couldn't believe it. "He doesn't really leap into the same people's lives multiple times." She glanced at Sammy Jo. Not usually but there were exceptions and if Sam could make an exception for anybody it would be to save his brother. She didn't remember Tom ever dying but, well, that would just mean that he had succeeded. "What makes you think that? He confess again?"

Tom shook his head. "No, Sam would have leaped into himself the first time and then seen that just telling us didn't work so when he leaped into my friend Magic the day before I was supposed to die, he played it a little cooler than that. I mean, he was probably relying on future knowledge by knowing things that he couldn't or wouldn't explain but because it was Magic we just went along with it. He personally gunned down a traitor who was about to kill me. He was also really upset that I told him that I wasn't going to keep my promise to Sam to stay safe on April 8th because I had orders."

"So you really believed that he was from the future? Even without knowing about the Project?" Sammy Jo asked, surprised.

Tom hesitated. "Not at the time, no. Katie was moved by the song even then but she didn't want to believe and it was only when it actually came out that it really freaked her out. I wasn't there for Sam's little rendition but she told me about it a few years later. We all knew that Sam believed what he said but we just thought it was stress because time travel? Really? And then Sam admitted he made it all up and that was that. But then I almost died on that exact day Sam predicted and Magic had been reminding me of my brother. So when Sam told me that he wanted to invent a way to time travel, of course I knew he could do it, even more so after he actually started on Project Quantum Leap."

"That is so weird," Sammy Jo said, fascinated.

"Just don't tell Sam that that's how I knew he could do it," Tom instructed them. "I'm down with being the super supportive older brother who just believed in him."

"Does it bother you?" Sammy Jo asked abruptly.

"Does what bother me?" Tom asked, confused.

Donna was pretty sure that she knew where Sammy Jo was going with this. "That you died before Sam leapt and saved you. Assuming that you're right about what happened, of course.

Tom shook his head. "No. Why should it?"

"Well, you were dead," Sammy Jo reiterated.

"And now I'm not," Tom pointed out. "And now I got to meet and marry Kimberly and had three children that I adore more often than they drive me crazy and I've got a wonderfully mysterious job. Overall, I'd say that the change was for the better and I'm not about to complain."

"I suppose that if the change was from you dying to not dying then you have no alternate past that you lost," Sammy Jo mused.

"There is that," Tom said, looking as though this line of thought had never occurred to him. He had just sort of accepted that there was a good chance that he would have died but Sam saved him and moved on. "But even had I not died, I still wouldn't ever object to my life being made better. That just sounds silly to me."

Donna thought of Kimberly and that Back to the Future discussion. It didn't matter, though.

Tom snapped his fingers suddenly. "Oh, I've got it! You've heard this story before, Donna, but then you've heard most of them."

"Tom and Katie were always ready with a Sam story but back when Sam and I first got engaged, they made it their mission to make sure that I knew all of the Sam stories that there were to know," Donna explained. "But then they decided that they would never be able to share all of them."

"Does Dr. Beckett have that many embarrassing moments?" Sammy Jo asked, surprised. Donna understood. Sam had been good at projecting an air of professionalism at the Project and she hadn't known him outside of that. She hadn't even known him all that well at the Project. She suddenly wondered whether Sam would have his memories of having met her or if the fact that he leaped – both times – before Sammy Jo had been created meant that he would only remember the initial timeline.

"Sam was a genius," Tom replied. "Have you ever seen Doogie Howser?"

"Yes, a few times," Sammy Jo confirmed.

"Well, I haven't, but as a kid doctor I'm sure he had plenty of embarrassing moments himself. This one is about Sam's wedding." He looked over at Donna to see if she could tell where he was going with this yet.

Donna shrugged apologetically. "You have a couple of stories about our wedding."

"True," Tom conceded. "Well, this is about how Sam was so petrified about being left at the altar that he refused to leave his groom room until after he sent me to verify the fact that Donna was, in fact, there. He didn't think that anybody would actually show up to their own wedding and then leave the groom at the altar."

"It wouldn't make much sense," Sammy Jo agreed.

"I would never do that to Sam!" Donna cried out, upset. She had had her doubts, of course she had. She had known Sam for ages and he was the best man she'd ever known. She had been afraid that he was too good to be true and kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. For the most part (if you ignored the way he'd gone missing for five years and accidentally had a daughter) it never had. But all of that was more to do with her than Sam himself. And surely if she ever did have to call off a wedding she'd have had the courtesy to let him know in person instead of just abandoning him up there and let his fears slowly grow until he couldn't deny them anymore.

"Oh, he knew that, really," Tom was as quick to assure her as he always was.

"It's just one of those phobias he had and so it was easier for him to wait up there until you were ready if I guaranteed that you had actually shown up. And, between us, he still had no idea what he had done to deserve you – and neither do I! – so he just wanted to make sure," Tom explained.

Donna rolled her eyes. "Flatterer."

"What's a groom room?" Sammy Jo inquired.

"It's like a bride room except for the groom," Tom answered.

"Is that a real thing?" Sammy Jo asked skeptically.

"I don't think so but Al wanted one so we had one," Tom said, shrugging.

"Wouldn't it be Sam's decision?" Sammy Jo pressed.

"Technically, yes, but he really wanted one and Sam's pretty easy going," Tom told her. "It's why you're always caught by surprise when suddenly he decides that something's worth fighting over."

"And speaking of Al," Donna said, laughing at the memory, "didn't we end up having to hide the clothes he brought to the hotel room so that we could be absolutely sure that he'd wear what he was supposed to?"

"Oh, yes," Tom said, grinning. "It took him nearly two hours of wandering around in a towel and, strangely, fending off advances from some of the women he passed in his search, before he'd give in to the inevitable and just wear what Beth picked out for him. The hotel was not pleased."

"Was that really necessary?" Sammy Jo asked, unsure. "I-I know that the Admiral has a very…distinct sense of fashion-"

"That is probably the most polite way I've ever heard that described," Donna interrupted, shaking her head.

"I thought he was colorblind for nearly a year after I first met him," Tom confided.

"But would he really wear something he shouldn't to his best friend's wedding?" Sammy Jo finished. "Again, I don't know him very well but we've all seen how dedicated he is to Sam."

"You have to remember that this was more than ten years ago," Donna reminded her. "And, well, I'm not sure but Beth still won't show us her own wedding pictures and she won't even talk about it."

"Although there are decent odds that it's just to drive us to coming up with conspiracy theories," Tom told her.

"Was your wedding nice?" Sammy Jo asked her.

Donna smiled at that. "Yeah," she said softly, "it was really nice. And though the actual mechanics were a little annoying, everything it represented…And Sam was so happy. The way that he looked at me…It was one of the best days of my life."

"I was at my mother's wedding," Sammy Jo said dreamily. "I didn't like it very much."

"You didn't approve of the groom?" Tom asked.

Sammy Jo shook her head. "Oh, it wasn't that. Michael was fine. It's just that the wedding itself – and especially the service beforehand – was extremely boring. And the reception was okay for awhile but then that dragged on, too. And most of the food was disgusting and there wasn't anybody my age that I knew. And then afterwards I had to stay with one of my mom's friends for a week while she and Michael were on their honeymoon. I had to sleep on the couch."

"Well, when you…Pardon, are you married, Sammy Jo?" Tom asked her.

Sammy Jo shook her head. "No, I'm not."

"Well, when you get married then your wedding will be more fun, I guarantee it," Tom promised, smirking. "Although your reception might seem to take even longer to get through. I'm just saying…"


	7. Chapter 7

"Do you think Athena is a stripper name?" Sammy Jo asked suddenly.

Donna started. "What?"

Patiently, Sammy Jo repeated the question. Donna had heard her very well the first time but apparently she needed time to wrap her mind around it. Was it really such a strange thing to ask?

If the way that Donna was looking at her was any indication, she clearly thought that it was. "Where is this even coming from?"

"My friend and I were having dinner one time and, for some reason, we were discussing baby names. I told her that I felt that my name put me at a disadvantage and-" Sammy Jo began to explain.

"Wait, why?" Donna interrupted.

"Oh, Samantha Fuller is fine," Sammy Jo replied. "And that is the name I go by officially. It's just that people hear the name 'Sammy Jo' and they make…assumptions."

"What kind of assumptions?" Donna asked.

Sammy Jo shot her a look. "You know what kind of assumptions."

"Perhaps," Donna allowed.

For some reason, nine times out of ten when she wasn't in the south and when someone that she didn't know heard that she was 'Sammy Jo' they assumed that she was stupid. And, from the way some people had looked at her, inbred. It was extremely frustrating but, try as she might, she just couldn't think of herself as a 'Samantha' and being called 'Sam' was just completely out of the question. And so she was either Dr. Fuller or Sammy Jo. Other people might have congratulated her on standing firm to her principles or whatever but, really, if she could connect 'Samantha' with herself then she would have just gone with that. She had been feeling that 'Sammy Jo' was more of a child's name but somehow or other she had never grown out of it.

"So I don't want a name like that and I don't want a name that will leave my child be called, say, 'Sarah F' all throughout school," Sammy Jo continued. "And no one wants to give their child an ugly name – though some people clearly do – and so I settled on 'Athena' as a nice name. Since I'm not having any children in the near future, I don't know if I ever would name a child that but right now I like it."

"What about for a boy?" Donna asked.

Sammy Jo made a face. "Oh, I wouldn't ever want a boy."

"Why not?" Donna inquired.

Sammy Jo shrugged. "I think girls have prettier names."

"And your friend said that 'Athena' sounded like a stripper name?" Donna asked uncertainly.

Sammy Jo nodded. "Yes, she didn't like that name and said that she thought it sounded like something a stripper would go by. I don't know much about strippers but I guess I sort of assumed that the closest any of them went to using a real name was 'Candy.'"

"You should ask Al," Donna advised dryly. "I'm sure that he would be a great help there."

Yes because asking her boss about his experience with strippers would be such a great idea. Even though she was talking to Donna about strippers, it was more in an abstract way than Donna was implying a conversation with the Admiral would be. And she was at least on a first name basis with her!

"I have heard all sorts of things about people with unusual sounding names having problems in life and nobody can pronounce their names and nobody wants to hire them and they're not as happy as people with normal names," Sammy Jo said hesitantly. "I don't know if that's true or not, I've hardly researched the subject myself, but I certainly wouldn't want to ruin my hypothetical future child's life by giving them a problematic name. But I rarely actually really like typical names. And I thought I heard something about Athena being common enough among Greek people anyway."

"You're not Greek, are you?" Donna asked her. "You don't look Greek and I know that Sam's not."

Sammy Jo shook her head. "No, I'm not. But if it's not that weird of a name if you're Greek then I don't see why it would be that weird of a name if you're not."

"Where did you get the name Athena from anyway?" Donna asked her. "The mythology?"

"Well…sort of…" Sammy Jo said slowly.

Donna raised an eyebrow. "Sort of?"

"I might have watched Battlestar Galactica when it was on," Sammy Jo admitted. "I didn't really like Lieutenant Athena but she had a nice name. And then I discovered Greek mythology in high school. I liked the name Artemis as well, just not as much. I liked the name Iphigenia, too, but I'm not even sure that I pronounce it right, let alone anyway. Don't even try to get me to say her parents' names."

"Do you like Greek mythology?" Donna asked curiously.

Sammy Jo shrugged. "Honestly, I'm not sure."

"Oh no?" Donna asked.

"I find most of it extremely fascinating although there's no point trying to come up with a timeline for when any of this is supposed to be happening," Sammy Jo began. "But on the other hand, the gods – and the mortals, too – are all such terrible people."

"They can't be all that bad by myth standards," Donna argued.

"I'm not really familiar with any ancient myths besides the Greek and Roman ones," Sammy Jo replied. "But I do know that they have parents regularly eating their offspring and people and gods – mostly Zeus – regularly raping people. They have people daring to claim they were more skilled at something than a god was and, when they successfully proved it, are harshly punished for being right. They have people falling in love with a piece of art they created and the art coming to life and marrying them as a reward. They have Zeus eating the mother of his child and having such a splitting headache someone, in what I can only hope was a failed attempted murder, splitting open his skull with an ax and Athena popped out fully grown and dressed in armor."

"Well when you list it like that of course it's going to sound strange!" Donna exclaimed.

"What about the fact that Zeus proposed to Hera every day for, what, three hundred years and she only accepted – if you can call it that – when he turned himself into a bird and she said 'oh, I love you!' and he turned back and claimed that now she had to marry him. Which she did." Sammy Jo shook her head, trying to understand how that even worked.

"Maybe she was tired of him always trying to get her to marry him and figured that once she just went ahead and did it he'd leave her alone," Donna suggested. "Which, going by the myths, he probably did."

"I really hate Dionysius," Sammy Jo continued. "Apparently he's to blame for sexism, you know. There was a council of twelve really important gods that made the important decisions or something and there were six female and six males on it. Zeus decided that his glorified frat boy son should have a place on the council but everyone else thought it was a stupid idea and so claimed that they could only have twelve members. Then the pushover god, Hestia goddess of the hearth and home, stepped down so that he could be on the council. And since that put the gender ratio at seven males to five females, things went poorly for the females from then on. Way to go Hestia."

"You realize that these myths aren't actually real, right?" Donna asked rhetorically. "History happened the way history happened and this is just how they tried to explain it."

"That may be," Sammy Jo conceded, "but in-universe it is all Hestia's fault. And either Theseus abandoned Ariadne, the woman who turned against her own father to save him from the minotaur, or he was forced to because Dionysius decided she was so beautiful she had to marry him. And some versions of the story have him erasing her memories. And then Apollo was so creepily concerned with his sister's virginity that he tricked her into fatally shooting the only man she had ever loved. And some wood nymph was worried about being molested by some other guy so her only recourse was to become a tree. And Prometheus was tied to a cliff for what was supposed to be forever for giving people fire? And Hades got away with kidnapping Persephone because she ate a few seeds? And Hera took her frustrations about her husband cheating with the woman who usually didn't have a choice about sleeping with him and their offspring? She forced Heracles to go mad and kill his family which he had to repent for? And Iphigenia's father accidentally killed Artemis' boar so she had to be sacrificed or they couldn't go off to war?"

"I sometimes wonder about mythology, too," Donna confided.

"Mostly, I just wonder what they were on," Sammy Jo replied.

\----

"So do you ever want to start a family someday?" Donna asked her.

"I really don't know," Sammy Jo replied, shrugging.

"Oh, come on. That's not a real answer. You have to have at least thought about it and if you haven't then I think that that's a pretty good indication of where you stand," Donna said reasonably.

"I'll tell you this," Sammy Jo declared. "I had to watch this video about giving birth back in college. I don't know if it was their intention but they definitely freaked me out about labor. I don't think I could ever go through it and, by the time labor started, there's no changing your mind."

"It's only a few hours, though," Donna pointed out. "Quite possibly the worst and probably the most painful few hours you've ever had but it will end soon enough."

Sammy Jo nodded. "Yeah and then I'll have a baby who won't sleep through the night and cries all the time to take care of while it takes me weeks to recover from just the childbirth. And childcare is extremely expensive and people will be judging me about not being a stay-at-home mom. Maybe I'd even face some problems from people expecting me to quit to drive myself crazy staying at home with a baby all day. And let's not even get started about all the work I'd have to miss and getting back in the swing of things while I'm still recovering. And what if something important happens and people need me while I'm out of the picture? There's just so much that could go wrong."

"I thought you hadn't thought about it," Donna said lightly.

"I haven't," Sammy Jo insisted. "Trust me, this is me not having thought a lot about something."

"I don't even want to know what it's like when you have," Donna replied, laughing a little.

No, she probably didn't.

"I don't think it's wise to hold off on getting pregnant because there might be something that needs you at work nine months in the future," Donna advised. "We can't predict when Sam will come back or when we'd need you and it might be years. You might miss your chance to have children if you're going to wait on him."

"That's just one reason," Sammy Jo assured her. "There's also the fact that I think pregnancy itself would be one of the most awful ordeals ever and an extremely harrowing experience."

"I think you might be exaggerating a little," Donna replied. "After all, some women deeply enjoy their pregnancies."

"I've found that people are diverse enough that you're bound to find someone that deeply enjoys virtually anything you can think of," Sammy Jo said dryly. "But come on, think of all the nausea and the bloating and the cravings and the food aversions and the soreness…Think of the possibility of being confined to bed rest towards the end. Think of all the things that pregnant woman can't do! You might as well not even bother going to an amusement park."

"I can't say that I can't see the logic behind pregnant women not riding really intense roller coasters," Donna said. "But then, I can't see the logic of me riding them, either."

"You don't like roller coasters?" Sammy Jo asked, surprised.

Donna shook her head. "Oh, no. Even the roller coasters for small children aren't a fun experience."

"They're not supposed to be fun for anyone over the age of five," Sammy Jo pointed out.

"I know but not that way. They had this one little baby drop and my stomach was contemplating mutiny," Donna told her. "Sam made me go on it once, said that surely I could handle one like that. And it wasn't that I couldn't handle it although it was kind of humiliating to have to go on alone."

"Dr. Beckett didn't go on with you?" Sammy Jo inquired.

Donna shook her head. "He was too busy laughing at me. But to be fair, he was trying to make up for roping me into going on that drop with him."

Sammy Jo's eyes widened. "One of those huge drops? That's kind of a terrible idea for someone who hates roller coasters."

"I think Sam saw that after seeing my reaction to the ride," Donna agreed. "It was the first time we'd ever been to an amusement park together and so he underestimated how much I hated those kinds of rides. And I hadn't been in a few years so I had mostly forgotten as well."

"What kind of rides do you even go on if you don't like drops or roller coasters?" Sammy Jo asked curiously.

"It's a challenge sometimes finding things," Donna admitted. "On the drop, I was seated next to Sam and two people we didn't know. I was really freaking out going up because it's so tortuously slow. And then sometimes you have to just hang at the top, frozen in suspension because you know what's going to come and you can't stop it and you don't know when. And on the way up one of the people next to us started singing 'Old MacDonald' and it was the most random thing but it wasn't helping with my nerves. You don't even want to know how much I screamed going down. And not in the 'I'm having fun' way, either. I felt like my stomach was going to pour right out of me. And then afterwards I was staggering around like I was drunk."

"It sounds like you had a pretty rough time," Sammy Jo said sympathetically.

"That's why it doesn't bother me that, if I get pregnant, I can't ride the rides," Donna responded.

"Oh, I'm not saying that I don't see the need for those kinds of guidelines," Sammy Jo explained. "Far from it. It's just that there's apparently so many things that you can't do or eat and whatnot that I'm kind of wondering how anyone has a healthy baby at all. I know I'd spend nine months freaking out about not doing things that aren't good for the baby."

"Excess stress really isn't good for the baby," Donna pointed out.

Sammy Jo threw back her head and groaned.

"For all these negatives you mentioned that you were undecided about kids," Donna reminded her.

Sammy Jo shrugged. "Well, yeah. I do like children. I'm a bit uncertain about spending so much time with babies who won't sleep through the night and then toddlers who won't stop making messes but…I really do think that would be worth it. It's just getting the baby in the first place that's an issue."

"There's always adoption," Donna suggested.

"I guess," Sammy Jo agreed. "But that sounds really complicated. It would probably be easier to just have one myself. Unless I have problems conceiving, I guess…" She shook her head. "What about you? Do you want kids?"

There was a distant look in Donna's eyes. "Yes. Someday. When Sam gets back. I-I actually thought I might have been, after he came back to me briefly but…it wasn't to be."

\----

"So I've heard that you're a fan of Norse mythology," Sammy Jo told her.

Donna looked amused. "Really?"

"Well, it was actually 'Norse myth nut' but that didn't sound very polite," Sammy Jo admitted.

"There's nothing weird about being a fan of the mythology," Donna claimed. "I mean, it may not be as common as Greek and Roman mythology is and I may be one of the only people I know who follow the actual myths instead of the comics but it's still perfectly normal."

"You sound a little defensive," Sammy Jo noted, intrigued.

Donna just shook her head. "Al does not find it normal. Although, really, he's one to talk. And it could be worse. I could be into Egyptian mythology."

"What's wrong with Egyptian mythology?" Sammy Jo inquired, furrowing her brow.

"You can't ask what's wrong with a people's culture!" Donna exclaimed.

Sammy Jo thought about it and realized that she was right, even if that hadn't been the way she meant it. "What makes you think that Al would prefer you to be a fan of Norse mythology?" she amended.

"Nothing much," Donna said casually, "mostly just what happens with Isis and Horus."

"And what is that?" Sammy Jo asked patiently.

"Osiris was dismembered by his brother, Isis put him back together, and then temporarily revive him in order to conceive a son," Donna replied succinctly.

Sammy Jo nodded. "Well, that is certainly dedication. But, while I really don't know much about Norse myths, I think that that has the potential to be pretty disturbing as well."

"I really don't think so," Donna disagreed.

"Wasn't there something about somebody getting their mouth sown shut?" Sammy Jo asked. "Because I've got to tell you, stuff of nightmares right there."

"Hm, well, I don't really remember that," Donna said in a tone that indicated that she remembered very well.

"Are you sure? Because I could have sworn-" Sammy Jo started to say, grinning.

"Not that I'm doubting you, or anything," Donna interrupted. "But if you can't remember any names or other pertinent details…"

"You're probably right," Sammy Jo said easily. "What about everyone going to war at the end of time and destroying everything?"

"Ragnarok?" Donna asked rhetorically. "There is nothing strange about an end of the world tale. Every major religion, including Christianity, has one."

"Sure," Sammy Jo agreed. "But I've read the Book of Revelation and, uh, strange."

"Well then there's nothing overly strange about what the Vikings thought would happen," Donna said easily.

"Okay but even if I concede that then there's still the matter of that one guy somehow giving birth to his father's eight-legged horse," Sammy Jo pointed out.

"It's mythology," Donna said, shrugging. "You're going to have to expect a few eight-legged horses thrown in here and there. And who wouldn't want an eight-legged horse? They go much faster."

"That wasn't really the part that I was focused on," Sammy Jo replied. "I was more concerned about the guy giving birth to a horse. Or at all. But especially to a horse."

"Greek mythology has cross-species mating all the time," Donna countered. "Where did the minotaur come from?"

"But if he was human at the time then in Greek myths he'd have given birth to a half-horse," Sammy Jo claimed.

"I really don't recall any such story," Donna said, not looking at her. "But if I did then I'd have to remind you that ancient people likely didn't have a very good working knowledge of what was biologically possible and not possible."

"I would have thought they'd have grasped that men don't have babies," Sammy Jo grumbled.

"If you don't remember any of the details…" Donna trailed off.

"I'm going home tonight and researching!" Sammy Jo threatened. "Or at least this weekend."

"Good idea," Donna encouraged her. "It always pays to know a little mythology."

\----

"I always find people's arguments against time travel to be really amusing," Sammy Jo remarked.

"Amusing?" Donna repeated.

Sammy Jo nodded. "Yeah. Everyone always says that the bad argument against time travel is the fact that we've never met a time travel because if time travel was ever invented then in our five thousand or so year history someone would have time travelled back to somewhere."

"And why is that amusing?" Donna asked uncertainly.

"Because we know for a fact that they're wrong," Sammy Jo explained. "Time travel is possible, Dr. Beckett has done it, and still nobody is any the wiser. Well…few people are. Dr. Beckett may have told people who believed him at some point, I don't know. And if they didn't believe him then it doesn't matter."

"You say that it's amusing now," Donna said, shaking her head. "But it was far less so when that was actually one of the main arguments that people used when they didn't think Sam's idea could work. Specifically, they said that if the project ever worked then Sam could just come back in time to this very moment thus proving it worked and they'd start funding immediately."

Sammy Jo frowned. "That doesn't make any sense. Even if time travel could work – which we know it does – and he could leap as himself into the meeting, which he may figure out at some point or might have already worked out, then unless the project was funded in the first place there would be no future Sam to go back and convince anyone of the existence of time travel. Unless, I suppose, that time travel works as a stable time loop where nothing you do can change anything because if you time travel once then you've always time travelled and so your actions are just ensuring that history plays out the way that you remember it."

Donna laughed and looked almost fond. "That's exactly what Sam said. Al had to cut him off when he got a bit too technical. And, though we didn't know it then, time travel doesn't work like that. So a future Sam never appeared in that room but we still got the funding. If Sam ever does travel back and prove that it worked before we even started then we'll remember it as having always worked."

"Dr. Beckett might not even have leaped," Sammy Jo said consideringly. "At least not before we were ready to retrieve him."

"What would that mean for our Sam?" Donna asked. "The one who's leaping? Would we create an alternate universe where he never leapt? Or would he just have never leapt?"

"He'd still eventually leap," Sammy Jo said, fairly certain of this.

"But with greater control he wouldn't have ended up in the same places doing the same things," Donna reasoned. "And some of those things affected us. Do you really think he'd have leapt into someone while they were having sex if he could avoid it?"

"So we'd basically have the Sam that is leaping cease to exist and either the timeline would go back to how it was originally ready for Sam to make his new changes or it wouldn't," Sammy Jo said slowly. "I vote that we don't try to find out."

"So that's that. When Sam comes back we tell him that it would be a terrible idea for him to show that committee a thing or two, no matter how gratifying it might feel at the time," Donna declared.

\----

"Ziggy mentioned that she was planning on reading the Harry Potter books in preparation for the fourth one coming out," Donna remarked.

"Yeah, I talked her into it," Sammy Jo replied. "She didn't originally see the point but I eventually helped her see the light."

"You mean you annoyed her into agreeing with you," Donna translated.

"You have your methods and I have mine," Sammy Jo said breezily. "Try not to judge."

"The thing is, though, that you told me this yesterday and today I asked her what she thought and she said that she wasn't finished yet," Donna said, completely flabbergasted.

"Well, the series does take awhile to finish. I've heard that the fourth book is the longest yet," Sammy Jo informed her.

"But she's a super-computer!" Donna exclaimed. "It took her less than a minute to download and process the complete works of Shakespeare! Well…I think it was the complete works. Either way, she got at least one play done in less than a minute."

"I'm still not quite seeing the connection," Sammy Jo admitted.

"It's been at least a day and she hasn't finished them!" Donna cried out. "I might be able to understand if she simply didn't start them but Ziggy is more than capable of multi-tasking. How is she in the middle of reading them?"

"Ah," Sammy Jo said, nodding. "Well…that might be because of me.

"You?" Donna asked, mildly surprised. Was she wondering if she ought to be more surprised or less so?

"I suggested to her that perhaps she was just processing the information too quickly to be able to truly appreciate the beauty of what was going on and the suspense of not knowing until the very end and so I've been reading them to her when I've had time for the last week," Sammy Jo told her. "It would have been more convenient for all of us if I could have just gotten an audio book but I don't even know if they have one for Harry Potter."

"I can't believe she has the patience for that," Donna marveled. "Are you sure she didn't cheat and download it all and is now just pretending not to know what's going to happen?"

"I did consider the possibility and asked her about it," Sammy Jo confirmed. "She seemed offended by the very thought."

"That means nothing," Donna said dismissively.

"I know," Sammy Jo agreed. "But in this case I actually do believe her. Not because that's not something she would do – because it really is – but because she has too much pride for that and is enjoying figuring out the plot twists too much. The best part, for her, is bragging about how superior her deductive skills are compared to we inferior humans."

"She's been figuring out plot twists?" Donna asked incredulously. "There is no way she figured out the Quirrell thing."

"Oh, she figured out the Quirrell thing alright," Sammy Jo said grimly.

"How?" Donna demanded. "And are we sure she didn't cheat?"

Sammy Jo shrugged. "Pretty sure. I can ask if you're really that curious."

Donna shuddered. "I'm not that curious."

Sammy Jo smiled. "I thought not."

"But how did she figure it out?" Donna asked, intrigued. "Did she tell you?"

"She cited the Law of Conservation of Detail," Sammy Jo explained. "She just refused to believe that they would have mentioned Hermione knocking down Quirrell around the same time as she set Snape's robes on fire and that Harry was able to regain control of his broom unless it was somehow important."

\----

"I was thinking about myths and time travel," Donna announced.

"Come up with anything good?" Sammy Jo asked her.

"Possibly," Donna said, shrugging. "I find it fascinating, at least."

"Well then let's hear it," Sammy Jo said invitingly.

"When you mentioned our five thousand years of history and how the odds seem good that someone would time travel back somewhere in that period even if it was only once it got me thinking," Donna began. "Well, what if someone did just that? They could have explained everything and, assuming that our current world is reflective of any changes doing that wrought, would people really believe there was a time traveler centuries ago? Millennia ago?"

"I kind of doubt it," Sammy Jo replied.

Donna nodded. "Exactly. They'd just chalk it up to myths. And what if the time traveler didn't share that they were from the future? What if, say, they set up camp as the local deity? Could Zeus and Hera be time travelers? Thor and Loki? Isis and Set?"

"I doubt they would have had those names," Sammy Jo said, wrinkling her nose.

"It depends where they are from and how far in the future. If it's far enough, maybe they're from a different planet," Donna said, her eyes alive with the possibilities. "Or maybe they just had normal names like Mary and John and decided to go with something more exciting or more culturally appropriate for their stint as deities."

Sammy Jo cocked her head thoughtfully. "You know, for all that everyone says that 'Mary' is so common of a name, I don't know if I know any who are younger than seventy…"

"About the possibility for time travelling deities? Or time travelers who become deities in the eyes of the ancient people?" Donna asked impatiently.

"Huh? Oh, yeah, that's definitely the kind of thing I'd do if I ended up really far in the past," Sammy Jo declared. "Assuming, of course, they didn't burn me for being a witch. I'd need to carefully consult an eclipse guide before I went…"

"And…that is why it's a good thing that Sam leapt instead of you," Donna informed her.

"He can have the past," Sammy Jo said, shrugging. "I've got a cell phone."


	8. Chapter 8

"Is this really necessary?" Sammy Jo asked uncertainly.

"You want to meet Sam when he comes back, right?" Donna asked rhetorically. "Maybe talk to him for longer than it takes to say 'So, you're my father. You're too damn young. And my mother's dead'?"

There was a brief silence and Donna remembered that they had never actually spoken about that. She knew that Sam would want to get to know Sammy Jo and she knew that, even if he didn't, if she could get herself prepared for that then she would be ready if far less happened. She had just never actually brought it up with her.

"I…yes," Sammy Jo said finally. "I was willing to meet the man that I believed abandoned my mother and never looked back so of course I should meet the man who saved my mother and myself three times."

She didn't sound very enthusiastic but it was hardly surprising. She didn't understand the wonderful man that she had missed out on getting to know her entire life. All she knew was that it was bound to be awkward. She was still willing to do it, though, and she'd understand soon enough. Donna would be honestly surprised if it took more than one conversation before she adored him the way that everybody always did.

And she thought that she might actually start to be getting okay with that.

"Well you can't really be a part of Sam's life without having some sort of contact with Al," Donna said matter-of-factly. "The man's never had a very well-defined sense of boundaries and being Sam's only contact all these years means that that's only going to have gotten worse. I don't even want to think about what he's gotten up to as a hologram…"

"I'm perfectly fine with the Admiral," Sammy Jo protested.

"You call him 'the Admiral'," Donna said pointedly.

"Well, he is the Admiral," Sammy Jo countered.

It was so strange seeing someone so nervous about getting to know Al of all people. Donna had never thought of him as unapproachable (quite the opposite, in fact). But then, while she had known him in a professional capacity initially, she had only really gotten introduced to him from the privileged position as Sam's beloved girlfriend and so perhaps that wasn't everyone's experience.

And it had been Donna who had done all the work at the start of getting to know Sammy Jo. This woman really did not like to enter into awkward situations, did she? It's what made the fact that she had started all of this so very strange.

"And it will just make things easier on everyone, yes including you, if you get to know the Admiral before Sam gets back," Donna insisted.

Sammy Jo looked skeptical.

"This way you won't have to worry about getting to know them both at the same time," Donna said reasonably. "And trust me, it will happen. There's really no point fighting it."

"That's more or less what Ziggy said," Sammy Jo murmured.

Donna did not, as it happened, want to know exactly what Ziggy had said.

"I'm just a little…uncertain because I know for a fact that he knew about me from the very beginning," Sammy Jo explained.

"When, exactly, is the beginning?" Donna asked reasonably. "When you were born? When you came to work at the project? When one of Sam's leaps resulted in your existence?"

"That last one," Sammy Jo replied.

"Well, how do you know?" Donna asked curiously.

"About a year ago he abruptly came up to me and asked me a bunch of questions about my mother," Sammy Jo told her. "I figure that that's a good place to use as the beginning of when the Admiral helped Dr. Beckett change the timeline to include me. It's not exact, of course, but if he was going to ask me all those questions before Dr. Beckett returned to question me himself then he'd do it right away, right? So right after he found out about me and that I was working at the project he'd ask."

"A whole year, huh?" Donna asked, shaking her head. "Wow that is a long time."

"And now I'm supposed to get to know him," Sammy Jo said, sighing.

"Al's really easy," Donna assured her. "Don't say anything against Sam, his wife, or his girls. Don't mention the word 'dirk' no matter if you're talking about a person or a weapon. Don't mention Vietnam. Don't seriously take issue with what he wears. Don't get upset or offended if he mentions his rather colorful past."

"That sounds simple enough to remember," Sammy Jo said, nodding. "Some are pretty self-explanatory but others…"

"You don't want to know," Donna told her. "Trust me. Even I don't know about the Dirk one except that he's known a few who happen to be among the worst people that he's ever met."

"I have never met anybody named Dirk. I didn't even know people were called Dirk," Sammy Jo announced.

"Then you should have a pretty easy job," Donna told her.

\----

"I've got to say, Donna, that I did not see this coming," Al told her as they ate in the project cafeteria. Sammy Jo was going to be joining them but hadn't arrived yet.

"You didn't see what coming?" Donna asked politely.

"I thought that when you and Sammy Jo first found out about each other it would be a miracle if we could convince the two of you to stay in the same room together without you trying to kill her," Al said, shaking his head. "And now look at you! You're holding real conversations and everything!"

Donna frowned. "Wait, why were you worried that I'd kill her and not the other way around? You just like her better than me, don't you?"

"Yes, Donna, that's it exactly," Al agreed. "And aside from that, the fact that she has a stepmother isn't really going to upset her all that much. The fact that suddenly Sam has a daughter running around…well, you took the news worse than she did."

"And I'm over it," Donna insisted. She was getting there.

"So what happened?" Al asked. "How did you two start getting so chummy?"

"We are both adults and professionals and we decided that awkwardness wouldn't do anybody any good," Donna declared. "And there really is no need to make things any more complicated than they have to be when Sam comes home."

"I agree," Al said, nodding. "So, as weird as I find all of this, I think I'm in favor of it."

Sammy Jo came walking through the cafeteria and pulled out the chair next to Donna.

"Hello, Dr. Fuller," Al greeted her.

"There is no way I'm going to be able to try and have a friendly conversation with you if you're going to call me Dr. Fuller," Sammy Jo informed him.

"So Sammy Jo, then?" Al asked. "That's fine. You'll have to call me Al, then. It always makes me feel a little weird when only one of us is being formal."

"I'll try not to call you Admiral then," Sammy Jo sort-of agreed and Donna had a feeling that she was planning on just not addressing him as anything if she could help it.

"You didn't buy your lunch?" Al asked, glancing at Sammy Jo's paper sack.

"Not today," Sammy Jo said, pleased.

"She only buys her lunch when she's running late," Donna explained.

"Which is most days," Sammy Jo said ruefully.

"How come?" Al asked.

"While brown bagging it makes me feel like I'm back in school, it does give me more of a selection than the cafeteria," Sammy Jo explained. "And it's not like I really get the chance to bring my lunch very often. I really should think about going to bed earlier. Or waking up earlier. Or getting up sooner after I woke up. Or not going online before work. There's more and more things to do on the internet every day. Exploring it is really fascinating and, well, kind of time-consuming."

Al frowned thoughtfully at her. "I don't recall hearing that you've ever been late coming in."

"I'm not," Sammy Jo replied. "But, you know, if you really have to you can get ready in about five minutes. No time for a better breakfast than Poptarts or packing your lunch but you can do it."

"Oh?" Al asked, surprised. "Five minutes, really? It takes me far longer to get ready."

"You have a loving wife and a desire to wear truly appalling outfits," Donna countered. "I assume that it takes you awhile to pick out the perfect one."

"You assume correctly," Al said, getting that same smile that he always did when he thought about Beth.

Sammy Jo nodded. "You really can. I discovered that back in high school."

"So this was a recurring problem you had?" Al inquired.

"That wasn't actually my fault," Sammy Jo protested. "See, my school district was kind of cheap and decided to save money on buses by having the same buses do the elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. In order for the high school students to have more time to do their clubs and activities and so that there would be someone to baby-sit the elementary schoolers if their parents were working or otherwise busy, the school district decided to ignore basic biology and have the high school start at seven twenty-five and the elementary school start at nine or something."

"Back when I was in school we all started at eight," Al told her.

Donna nodded. "Me, too."

Sammy Jo looked wistful. "Eight…Oh, I wish. So the bus came at around six-forty every morning but there was a margin of error of about five minutes for both ways, usually five minutes earlier. I had to wake up at five-thirty but I have never been a morning person."

"No one should be awake at five-thirty in the morning," Donna said, horrified.

"Not unless they're in the military," Al added.

"Unfortunately, even though I knew I needed to get up then I found that I just could not convince myself that I needed to get up before six and so I put my clock ahead forty-five minutes," Sammy Jo continued.

"Would that even work?" Al asked. "You'd still know that it's forty-five minutes fast and so it's really five-thirty."

"Sure I'd know it but I wouldn't see it and that makes all the difference," Sammy Jo replied.

Al shook his head. "If you say so…"

"And sometimes even that didn't work, especially if I was up late. There's only so much you can do if you sleep through your alarm or, in your barely-awake state, turn off the alarm and go back to sleep with no memory of having done so. You have no idea how many times I woke up at six-thirty or later. So I had to get completely ready in five minutes and run out the door," Sammy Jo told them.

"The thought of getting ready in five minutes, even if it wasn't me and happened years ago, is practically giving me a panic attack," Donna announced. She didn't think that it took her all that long, really, to get ready but five minutes? That was impossible.

"And I do mean literally running out the door. My house was the third on the street and I had to go to the corner behind me for the bus stop. I always had to run through the grass, hoping that I wouldn't be seeing the bus driving past my street, and often barely managing to get it. And if no one was there I often wouldn't know if I was going to be the only one there that day, if I was actually early, or if I missed the bus," Sammy Jo went on. "One time I was so late that the bus was leaving the subdivision and I tried to catch it but didn't manage to. I kept running from stop to stop trying to find someplace it hadn't stopped yet but I couldn't run fast enough."

"What did you do when you missed the bus?" Al asked her. "Were you just stuck at home?"

Sammy Jo shook her head. "My stepfather would always drive me. I hated to have to wake him up, though, even if it wasn't that far away. The parking lot was kind of a disaster area in the morning and right after school."

Al leaned over and placed his hand comfortingly over hers. "It's over now. You're in a safe place."

\----

"No, really, it has nothing to do with Verbena," Al claimed. "I just don't like psychologists in general."

"How come?" Sammy Jo asked.

"Allison took place in some experiment that was designed to implant memories that never actually happened," Al told him. "She didn't know that that was the reason at the time but she knows now. She knows that the memories that they gave her of me losing her in the mall when she was six never actually happened."

"Then what's the problem?" Donna asked uncertainly.

"She still is willing to use that against me in an argument and tries to make me feel guilty about it," Al grumbled.

"But…if it didn't actually happen then why do you let her?" Sammy Jo asked him.

Al just sighed. "You have clearly never been a parent."

"No," Sammy Jo conceded. "But that is really no answer."

"It doesn't actually matter what happened," Al explained. "They will stick to their story until the very end."

"Even when you have proof?" Sammy Jo asked, surprised.

"Especially when you have proof," Al insisted. "I swear, it's like every time we argue she somehow manages to work in 'Hey, Dad, I'd love to listen to you but remember that time that you lost me in the mall and I was wandering around alone and scared and helpless for two hours?' It doesn't matter if we're arguing about sports or religion or whose turn it is to wash the dishes!"

"Well if she has such an effective trump card, which she clearly must or she wouldn't keep using it, then can you really blame her for continuing to use it?" Donna asked rhetorically. "It's not like its effectiveness appears to be decreasing with repeated use."

"Yes I can absolutely blame her!" Al exclaimed. "It doesn't mean that she automatically wins but it definitely throws me off and I'm starting to think that if I haven't found a way to shut that argument down by now then it's just never going to happen."

"Why can't you come up with an answer to that if she keeps using it?" Sammy Jo inquired.

Al threw his hands up in the air. "You try arguing with someone who keeps insisting things that never actually happened still traumatize her!"

"You didn't ever do anything like that to your mother growing up?" Donna asked, turning to her.

Sammy Jo thought about it and then shook her head. "No. My mother always had to work far too hard for me to really be able to fight with her without feeling incredibly guilty so I rarely did."

Al barked out a laugh. "Oh yeah, she's Sam's kid alright."

"Oh, I don't know," Donna remarked. "I've heard stories."

Al straightened up. "Stories? You can't have Sam stories and not share them!"

Donna raised an eyebrow at him.

Al rolled his eyes. "Well, fine. Have it your way. You can't have Sam stories that you feel comfortable sharing and not share them!"

Donna couldn't say that she thought much of Al just demanding information but she understood. Al hadn't really gotten used to Sam being gone, not in the way that everybody else had to. Sam hadn't been in the present for longer than a few hours in over five years but Al had regularly been able to communicate with him and so, in a way, he hadn't lost Sam. And then suddenly he had.

"Okay," she agreed. "There was this one time on school picture day when Thelma wanted Sam to wear the most hideous grey outfit she could find. Sam, naturally, wasn't thrilled with the idea…"

\----

"I have a question," Sammy Jo informed them.

"That's good to know," Al said seriously.

Donna rolled her eyes. "What's your question?"

"Well, I don't like horror movies because I scary ridiculously easily and have far too active of an imagination," Sammy Jo explained. "My friends tricked me into seeing 'Funny Games' recently and I've been freaked out at night, worried that I'd see one of the guys turning the corner to my room. I just need to not watch home invasion movies."

"Why would you see Funny Games?" Donna asked, surprised. "That's a really terrifying movie!"

"I didn't know that," Sammy Jo protested. "And it's called Funny Games! How was I supposed to know? But anyway, we got to talking about our favorite horror movies and, as you might be able to guess, it was hard for me to come up with one because I don't like horror movies. I eventually did manage to think of something but they didn't believe that it was actually a horror movie."

"I could have sworn that she said that there was a question in there," Al muttered.

Sammy Jo blinked. "Oh, right. Well, I just wanted to know what your favorite horror movies are and if you think that my pick should count. And…that wasn't really phrased in the form of a question but you know that it is. It's two questions, actually."

"What's your favorite horror movie?" Al asked.

But Sammy Jo shook her head. "I'd really rather you guys tell me first."

Donna shrugged. "Alright. Mine is Final Destination."

"That just came out!" Al protested.

"And?" Donna asked rhetorically. "I found it scarier than any other horror movie I've ever seen."

"There's nothing all that scary about it, though," Al argued. "The deaths are all really over the top and everybody in the movie was really stupid."

"That's a common staple of horror movies, though," Sammy Jo pointed out. "Or at least that's what I've been made to understand."

"Not of good ones," Al said stubbornly.

"Go on and tell us why that's your scariest horror movie," Sammy Jo invited pointedly.

Donna pondered that for a moment. It's one thing to know that something scares you but being able to understand it and articulate it is quite a bit harder. "I suppose it's the inevitably of it all, especially given what we do."

"I don't follow," Al told her.

"Well, it starts off with a bunch of doomed people. Sam starts off with at least one doomed person several times more than one. Those people get a lucky break because one of them had a vision and got thrown off the plane. The people in the time Sam leaps into get a lucky break because he arrives, often with future knowledge, and is able to save them. But the people from the movie were never meant to survive and are all killed in increasingly horrible ways," Donna explained. "Now, we'd know about it if everyone that Sam tried to save was horribly murdered but it's still such a terrible thought."

Sammy Jo shuddered. "Oh, I can definitely see that. I don't think that there's anything more terrifying than knowing that your death is coming, whether you know how or when it is coming or not, and being powerless to stop it."

"The two situations have nothing to do with each other," Al complained. "And clearly the people that Sam saves were not meant to die because if they were then God or fate or whatever would not keep sending him to save these people. It just doesn't make any sense."

"It would if God or fate or whatever and Death or whatever were fighting and the people that Sam was saving were the chess pieces," Donna argued.

"But it didn't happen," Al stressed.

"You really do have no imagination," Donna complained.

Al drew back. "I do so have an imagination! And I'll have you know that it is delightful. I just don't see the need to apply horror movies to my real life and freak myself out."

"Fine then," Sammy Jo said, "what's your favorite horror movie?"

Al hesitated. "Is it alright if I have two?"

Sammy Jo glanced at Donna who shrugged. "It works for us."

"The Exorcist and the Blair Witch Project," Al promptly replied.

"The Blair Witch Project came out last year," Sammy Jo protested. "That's the first thing you complained about Donna's choice of Final Destination for."

"This came out in 1999," Al said as if that made any difference at all. "And for all we know, it actually happened."

"Oh come on!" Donna groaned. "Please tell me you're not one of those people."

"I think he just confessed to being one of those people," Sammy Jo told her.

Donna sighed. "You're right. Oh, this is so sad…"

"What?" Al asked anxiously. "What people?"

"The people who believe that just because it's done in documentary style that it might be an actual documentary," Donna explained.

"You can't prove that it didn't!" Al insisted.

"It's really hard to prove that things don't exist or didn't happen," Sammy Jo objected. "Like Bigfoot. I don't believe in him but I will never, ever be able to prove it because I can't have people looking in every spot on Earth at the same time."

"You could easily prove that this didn't happen," Al argued. "Just find the actors."

"I'm sorry, I should have said that 'it's really hard to prove that things don't exist or didn't happen and I definitely don't care enough to track down the actors'," Sammy Jo amended.

"The whole thing is really stupid," Donna told him. "Most of the movie was boring and it makes no sense that the murder victims to be would just stand passively in the corner while the other person was killed."

"She's a witch," Al reminded them. "Maybe it's magic."

Donna rolled her eyes. "Oh, it's magic! That's original."

"Witch," Al said again.

"And why would a witch deliver the footage to someone who could turn it into a film?" Sammy Jo challenged.

"As a warning, perhaps," Al speculated. "But I don't know. I don't really want to get inside the head of a murderous witch."

"If it was real, wouldn't that make it a snuff film?" Sammy Jo inquired. "They couldn't air that in theaters."

Al shook his head. "No, none of the deaths happened on-screen. You do have a point about being allowed to be shown in theaters but since it's unconfirmed if it's real that might have been how they got around it."

"I choose to believe that the movie was made with such a low budget that they were initially going to show the witch in some really cheesy and cheap costume but the person holding the camera dropped it and broke it. They couldn't afford another camera and so they just ended the movie there," Sammy Jo declared.

"I thought you said that you hadn't seen the movie," Al said, surprised. "Well, I guess you didn't actually say that but I had sort of assumed-"

"I haven't," Sammy Jo assured him. "But since when has that stopped me from forming an opinion about something? It's just a movie."

"Alright, and how about the Exorcist?" Donna asked.

AL just shook his head. "No way. If you can't understand what's so terrifying about the Exorcist then there's no point in trying to explain. There is no hope for you. The head spinning all the way around, the demonic possession, the way that someone from inside of the little girl wrote 'help me' on her stomach…Just everything about it, really." He shuddered. "I saw it in theaters with Beth and I haven't been able to sit through it again."

"And how about you?" Donna asked Sammy Jo.

She hesitated.

"Oh, come on," Al cajoled. "You're the one who brought it up and we've both told you ours."

"Alright," Sammy Jo agreed reluctantly. "It was Total Recall."

"Total Recall?" Al asked, stunned.

"Really?" Donna couldn't believe it either.

"I feel judged," Sammy Jo complained.

"How astute," Al said dryly. "How is that possibly a horror movie? It's a B-film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger."

"It's not so much the movie itself," Sammy Jo said slowly.

Donna wondered if it was anything like her own fear of Final Destination being more about what it represented to her than what it was. It probably was. Sammy Jo was never happy unless she was dissecting everything.

"Just the thought that you could be going about your life like anyone and then one day you find out that you're not actually who you think you are. You're not…you're not real, exactly. Your whole life is a lie. Everyone that you thought you knew was in on it and you're actually someone far beyond the realms of your own imagination," Sammy Jo said distantly.

"That kind of thing could never really happen," Al assured her.

"And time travel is impossible," she countered.

"I never understood that line of thinking," Al announced, staring at the ceiling. "Just because one thing that most people would probably dismiss as fictional is real that doesn't mean that everything is! If aliens were real and we knew about them that doesn't mean that unicorns are! Or vice versa, for that matter."

"I'm just saying that it's a bit much to say that it could never happen," Sammy Jo insisted. "Maybe not now but one day."

"Well fortunately for you then you don't live in the future," Al replied flippantly.

"I really see where she's coming from with this," Donna spoke up. "We have uncertain enough lives with the possibility that massive changes could take place and we'd never even notice so the added possibility that our lives are even less real is sure to be a disconcerting one. I'm sure we'd all be really horrified if that ever happened."

"It's like I saw a completely different movie than you two did," Al marveled, shaking his head. "And what do you mean 'even less real.'"

Donna looked to Sammy Jo who looked a little awkward.

"Well…" Sammy Jo said reluctantly. "I don't know. I'm just not entirely convinced that the things that change in the timeline are completely real, you know? Not before the chronological point in our timeline that things changed."

Alf frowned. "That doesn't make any sense. If the timeline changed then clearly it did happen. And it didn't just change right then. It changed however many years ago that the event changed."

"But if you go to bed one night and you have long hair and then, because the timeline changed, you woke up the next morning and had short hair then you might have memories of getting your hair cut but it doesn't seem to me like it actually happened. Sort of like Total Recall, actually," she mused.

Al was looking deeply uncomfortable at this. Was Beth right about Sam changing the timeline for her and Al to keep them together? Oh, Donna didn't doubt that Beth believed it but that might not make it true and there really was no proof. Did Al remember a life before Beth stayed? And even if he didn't and Sam didn't change anything, there was always the possibility that he had and Al simply didn't remember to contend with. No wonder he didn't like this theory.

"All of this stuff is getting way too philosophical for me," Donna declared. "All I know is that I woke up this morning in this timeline with things staying the same. I can't speak for all those other timelines and I don't care to."

"Amen to that," Al said fervently.

Sammy Jo seemed to realize that she'd inadvertently upset him. She winced. "Al-"

Al started. "Did she just call me Al?"

"I think she did," Donna agreed, grinning.

"Success!" Al cheered.

Sammy Jo frowned. "What are you two even talking about? You said I could call you that weeks ago."

"So I did," Al agreed. "But I do believe that this is the first time that you've ever taken me up on that."

"I've said it before," Sammy Jo insisted. "I have to have."

"I don't remember it," Donna offered.

"Neither do I and, given what a momentous occasion this is, I'm sure that I would," Al told her.

Sammy Jo made a face and went back to her lunch.

"She's never going to do it again, is she?" Al asked, almost rhetorically.

"I wouldn't count on it," Donna replied.


	9. Chapter 9

Sammy Jo was in the middle of something when the call came in. It wasn't anything time sensitive and even if it was, there was a decent chance that she would have stopped anyway to go see what was happening. In the year since Dr. Beckett had lost contact with them, they had only had someone appear in the waiting room a grand total of four times.

And now it seemed that they had hit a number five.

In the old days, Dr. Beckett leaping and their being sent the person he had replaced (looking like Dr. Beckett, of course, a fact that always freaked them out when they realized and certainly caused some problems when the person who appeared to be the very male Dr. Beckett started going into labor. Twice) had never really been a very noteworthy occurrence. It did mean that Ziggy, Gooshie, and Al were very busy for however long the leap lasted (usually not more than a couple of days). Well, in the beginning it had been when they had still really believed that every leap would be the leap home. Now no one ever said that they didn't believe anymore but they'd be a lot more surprised if it just up and happened than they would have in times past.

She rushed over to the waiting room. No one but Al (the only one who could see who was really there and not just the aura of Dr. Beckett) and Dr. Beeks ever went inside the waiting room but several people were already there peeking through the window of the door.

"Is Donna here?" Sammy Jo inquired, not seeing the woman around.

Gooshie shook his head. "Today is Dr. Elesee's day off but Ziggy called her so that she might decide to come in if she so chooses."

She would. Even though this was unlikely to lead to them finding Dr. Beckett, Donna wouldn't be able to help herself.

"I really wish that we could tell who's in there," Sammy Jo said wistfully. "All I can see is Dr. Beckett."

"I'm quite happy seeing him – if it is a him – in there," Gooshie told her. "The last time that 'Dr. Beckett' got out of that room, he was a deranged serial killer from 1958!"

Sammy Jo shuddered. "I guess they can't all be lost and deserving souls in need of Dr. Beckett's direct intervention."

"I'm here," Al announced from behind them and they all automatically parted to allow him to pass through.

Gooshie usually monitored what was happening in the waiting room just in case things got out of hand or something happened when Al wasn't there and so Sammy Jo followed him. Gooshie looked at her a little strangely but said nothing about it which was good because, being newfound a newfound friend of Donna and Al's or not, she really didn't have any justification for being in there.

"We're going to start running your program again now that we know that he's definitely in a leap," Gooshie told her. "Although unless he's able to give us something more specific than the previous leapees have done, I'm not optimistic about our chances. I really thought that we would have located him last time."

"One of these days we'll get someone who knows something," Sammy Jo assured him, trying to be positive.

"Yes," Gooshie agreed, no doubt thinking about some of the leapees they'd gotten who had known an awful lot. That one woman who they had to perform a miracle with in order to allow her to testify at her own trial remembered the events of her rape perfectly (though that wasn't exactly a blessing) and when they had Lee Harvey Oswald in there Al said that he seemed pretty clear about who he was and what he was about…even if all he'd do was lie about it. As people working on a time travel project that the government would likely never admit to, most of the Quantum Leap staff were huge conspiracy theorists and some were still sulking about the fact that Al and Dr. Beckett had proven the Kennedy conspiracy – always a popular one – to be utterly false.

Gooshie turned on the screen and volume and Sammy Jo could suddenly see someone who appeared to be Dr. Beckett – but, of course, wasn't – sitting imperiously on the waiting room table in Dr. Beckett's leap suit. Al, dressed as he always was even more ridiculously, was standing in front of him as was Dr. Beeks who was holding a clipboard.

"Hello, please try and remain calm," Dr. Beeks told him. "You are part of a government experiment and will be returned to your home, unharmed, in just a few short days. We ask that you bear with us until then."

'Dr. Beckett' said nothing.

"If you'll please report your name and year," she requested.

"Interesting," the man said slowly.

"What's interesting?" Al asked.

"You bring me here and yet you have no idea who I am," the man continued, not looking the slightest bit perturbed about the admittedly alarming situation that he had found himself in. "I can't decide if I find that surprising or not."

Dr. Beeks and Al exchanged a look.

"Why not?" she asked.

"This guy is seriously off-putting," Sammy Jo complained quietly.

"There are not many places where people do not know who I am so perhaps that can narrow down the possibilities of where I am," the man said thoughtfully. "And while the odds of me being accidentally abducted by people who do not know me remains very low, for numerous reasons, I rather flatter myself that anybody who knew who I was wouldn't dare try something like this."

"Just who, exactly, are you?" Al asked slowly.

"I am Odin Allfather," Odin declared. And that name sounded so familiar. Strange and familiar. She'd never heard of anyone in real life with that name but…

"Well, that's Donna's bat signal right there," Al said, staring at the man. "Are you…absolutely sure?"

The look Odin gave him then could best be described as sincerely wondering why such a trifling person was breathing the same air as him.

"Right, you're sure then," Al muttered.

"How did you manage to kidnap me?" Odin demanded.

"I've already told you, Odin, we didn't kidnap you. We-" Dr. Beeks tried to say.

"You said, I believe, that in a few days I will be returned to my home and the implication is that I cannot leave before then. I will most certainly be leaving before then but you cannot tell me that your intention was not kidnapping," Odin declared.

"Our intention was never kidnapping," Al protested. He paused. "Though perhaps we can concede that the end result does look a lot like kidnapping."

"Do you know what year it is?" Dr. Beeks asked, trying to keep them on track.

"Why wouldn't I know what year it is?" Odin asked suspiciously. "How long have you purported to have held me for? There is only so long that I can be gone before my people tear the realms apart looking for me."

"That does not sound good," Gooshie said worriedly. "Even with Dr. Beckett there pretending to be this Odin, I still do not like the sound of that."

"Neither do I," Sammy Jo agreed. "I can't even imagine what kind of a place he's in. You don't really think he's a Norse god, do you?"

"I'm uncertain," Gooshie replied. "I will need more data. The Admiral will be considering the possibility, though."

"It should be easy enough to prove or disprove given that he's not actually in Dr. Beckett's body," Sammy Jo reasoned. "Although, on second thought, I'm not sure that a, um, demonstration is in our best interests. Gods are kind of hard-core, you know. Or at least so the myths say."

"You've only been gone for exactly how long you've been awake here," Al quickly assured him. "And you won't be gone long, I'm sure."

"No," Odin said with quiet intensity. "I will not."

"Could you please just tell us what year it is where you come from?" Dr. Beeks asked again.

Odin peered down at them contemptuously for a long moment before answering. "No two realms keep track of time the same way. Judging by your appearances and your ignorance of who I am, am I correct in assuming that this is Midgard?"

"Midgard?" Dr. Beeks asked blankly.

"He means Earth," Al translated. "And yes, yes you are."

"Then I believe that it is the year 2011," Odin informed them.

Al and Dr. Beeks tried their best not to react to the news.

Sammy Jo, safe away from the action in the monitoring room, had no such restrictions and drew in a shocked breath. "2011? That's ten years into the future!"

"This is bad," Gooshie noted calmly. "This is very bad. Assuming that that is true, of course. If he is really from another realm then we could not look into their records and him being from the future makes it twice as impossible."

"How can something be 'twice as impossible'?' Sammy Jo inquired. "If it's impossible then won't it just stay impossible?"

"I suppose so," Gooshie conceded. "What I meant was that it's impossible for two distinct reasons now. And if he's lying to us or confused then it's still impossible as we don't know what the truth is."

"How did you manage to capture me and take me to Midgard? Why did you do so? What do you want? And why were you so surprised to hear that it is 2011?" Odin demanded, fury in his eyes.

"I-I'm sorry but at this point we cannot answer your questions," Dr. Beeks said apologetically.

Odin's eyes narrowed. "I see," he said in a tone of cold fury. "Is that your final word on the matter?"

"I'm afraid that it is," Al said grimly.

Odin stood up and walked to the door. Ignoring frantic cries to stop, he pulled it off its hinges (as it was always locked from the inside) and marched through it. Gooshie quickly switched the camera they were viewing so that they were just in time to see Odin neatly dispatching of the project's security.

"Oh boy," Sammy Jo breathed.

\----

Somehow, somebody – probably Al – had convinced Odin not to leave the building and to listen to the explanation that they were suddenly willing to give. Miraculously, nobody was dead although there were quite a few broken bones on the part of the people who had been unfortunate enough to go up against Odin.

"If someone had just been willing to explain the situation in the first place then we could have avoided all of this," Odin said reprovingly as if this were all their fault. To be fair, there was a case to be made for that. But how were they supposed to know that Odin's apparent lack of disorientation (and possibly Norse god status) very likely meant that he was immune to the usual Swiss-cheese brain and that they wouldn't be able to keep him restrained?

"Look, I know that you're upset and I quite understand. I don't remember it, exactly, but I know for a fact that I'd be just as upset," Al assured him. "After I realized that it wasn't one big, elaborate prank, that is." He waited for a response.

"Go on," Odin instructed.

"We will explain all the details in a minute, I swear we will, and answer any questions that we can," Al promised. "But first, you have to know that your people probably don't realize that you're gone."

Odin frowned. "How could that be? Have you taken me into the past or the future and plan on returning me to right when I left?"

Al hesitated. "Not exactly. A friend of mine looks just like you and is in your place right now."

Odin leapt to his feet. "What? This is an outrage!"

"I'm sure it is," Al agreed quickly. "But what you have to understand is that he didn't do it on purpose and we are just as eager as you are to bring him back here and to send you back to your time. Unfortunately, in order to do that we need to know exactly when and where you came from."

"Why?" Odin demanded.

"If we don't know where he is then we can't find him and we can't try and speed up his leaving of your life," Al explained.

Odin shook his head. "I don't think I could get any more specific than 2011. It was possibly summer. I generally do not pay a good deal of attention to Midgard and I've had a lot on my mind. As to where, I believe I'll have to show you where Asgard is. If anyone has a star map?"

Ziggy quickly put one up on the display and, working with Odin, located Asgard.

"I do not believe that anything exists up there," Ziggy said unhappily.

"It does," Odin said firmly as if that settled things.

Al turned to go and then stopped. "One last thing…Is there anything important going on when you left that we should know about? Say, any impending tragedies that need averting?"

Odin's eyes widened. While he hadn't forgotten whatever it was, it was clear that his new predicament had pushed his former concerns from his mind. "My sons are hanging off of a broken bridge with only me pulling them up!"

Al's eyes widened. "That…is not good."

"And given our relative strength disparities, I do not have faith that your friend can handle that, much less the aftermath," Odin said, now beginning to sound really horrified. "I must get back there!"

Sammy Jo rather disagreed. She wasn't sure if Dr. Beckett would be able to pull the pair up from the bridge but if Odin really could handle the situation then why had Dr. Beckett been put there in the first place? It seemed like too big of a coincidence for it to have been anything else.

"We'll get you back there as soon as we can," Al insisted. "Donna, I take it that you can explain things to Odin? I want to see if I can find Sam as soon as I can."

Donna nodded although she didn't look very happy at the prospect of having to deal with this mess on her own. Well, she wouldn't be alone but she'd be in charge. "Of course. And you might not want to tell Sam this all at once. He'd not really a believer."

"If it's true then I'll see if I can save time by having him tell me," Al agreed and then he was off. Gooshie slipped away as well.

"What is going on?" Odin demanded.

Sammy Jo didn't even want to know what he'd do if they didn't tell him.

Donna closed her eyes briefly and took a deep breath. Sammy Jo did not want to be her right now. "You're from the year 2011 but right now it's 2001."

"So I have gone back in time," Odin said, nodding and generally seeming far less thrown by this revelation than he might have been. Even the people who had wholeheartedly believed in aliens and concluded that they had been abducted had been a little more surprised that it had happened to them personally. "I see. I was not aware that the Midgardians possessed such a dangerous technology but I have not been paying as much attention as I could."

And what did that mean? Sammy Jo wondered if in ten years, assuming Odin remembered any of this which he probably would since he remembered Asgard perfectly now, they'd have to worry about being invaded and having all of their time travel equipment destroyed. She hoped not. It really would be such a waste.

"As far as we know, we're the only people who have the ability to travel in time right now," Donna informed him. Not that 'right now' meant much when it came to time travel and she couldn't be the only one who remembered hearing the horror stories from Al about the 'evil leaper.' Sure, she apparently turned good and vanished and her former observer was shot and killed but what kind of a project would only have two people on it?

"Is your project known to your people or do you have a secret project?" Odin asked reasonably.

"It's a secret," Donna admitted. "But not to the government. And if any problems come up we will deal with them."

"If you are time travelers then why am I here?" Odin inquired.

"Here at Project Leap, the idea was that someone could travel in time as long as it was within their own lifetime. They were supposed to be able to just pop up in the past, do whatever they were going to do, and then come back," Donna explained.

"And just what were they 'meant to do'?" Odin asked suspiciously.

" 'Set right what once went wrong'," Donna said, obviously quoting something. Al used that phrase a lot, too. It might as well be their motto. "Unfortunately, it didn't work the way that we thought it would. For various reasons, Dr. Beckett was forced to test the project sooner than we would have liked. He was still ending up in years that were within his lifetime but he was taking the place of someone else. He would go in their life and they would go in his. When he fixed whatever needed fixing, the person from the past would go back to their life not remembering their trip to the future and Dr. Beckett would leap somewhere else."

Odin was quiet for a moment, absorbing that. "How does he take the place of these people? And why is my reflection not my own?"

"No one actually switches bodies," Donna informed him. "But in order for Dr. Beckett to be able to set right what once went wrong, he has to convince people that he is the person who is uniquely situated to fix the problem. If he didn't look like them he would not be able to do it. You and Dr. Beckett are wearing each other's auras. Except for Admiral Calavicci, the man you were speaking to earlier, everyone who looks at you sees Dr. Beckett."

Odin nodded. "When you say that this Dr. Beckett of yours leaps somewhere else does that mean that he does not return here first before heading out again?"

Donna looked down. "As I said, he tested it before we were ready and so we've been trying to retrieve him for some time now. But not to worry, our inability to retrieve Dr. Beckett has nothing to do with your chances of going back. You will go back soon enough. I believe that the longest that Dr. Beckett has been on a leap was two weeks."

"Two weeks," Odin repeated. "I simply cannot afford to be gone for two weeks."

"It's usually significantly shorter," Donna reiterated. "Generally it's only a few days."

"I can't afford to be gone for just a few days, not right now," Odin insisted. "You people could not possibly have caught me at a worst time, not since the war ended."

"That is usually when Dr. Beckett leaps in," Donna said gently. "You mentioned that your sons were dangling from a bridge? There must be a story there."

Odin stilled. "Are you…are you insinuating that this Dr. Beckett of yours can fix my family situation better than I can?"

"I didn't say that," Donna assured him even though everyone was thinking it. It was nothing against Odin but that was simply how leaping worked.

"What can this human who knows nothing about my family possibly do that I can't do?" Odin demanded. "These are my sons and I don't think that the situation has ever been more dire! And now I'm told that I can't even be there for that? What difference does it make to this Dr. Beckett if my sons are lost or driven mad or whatnot?"

"Dr. Beckett cares," Sammy Jo spoke up quietly. "Dr. Beckett always cares. Maybe not as much as you do but, as you said, these are your sons. Dr. Beckett will do the best he can and he's had six years of experience doing this. If you have to be stuck here while someone else tries to save your family then you couldn't ask for a better substitute than Dr. Beckett."

Donna was looking at her like she was touched which didn't make that much sense. Everything that she was saying was true and, if it weren't for the fact that she didn't know Donna before, she would have said the same thing even if she hadn't known that she was Dr. Beckett's daughter.

Donna was always trying to make that out to be more than it was and she was starting to make Sammy Jo wonder if maybe it weren't worth a try after all.

"That may be so," Odin said slowly. "I do not doubt your sincerity. Just the same, he is not me and he could never be. I would not accept any in my place in such a circumstance."

"Respectfully, I don't see that you have a choice," Donna told him. "We can't send you back."

Strictly speaking, that wasn't quite true. Once when Dr. Beckett had leapt into a younger Al, they sent Al back to try and fix something that had gone wrong before Dr. Beckett had even shown up which would in turn lead to the prevention of something that Dr. Beckett hadn't known about in order to stop. They had even managed to send Al back with instructions not to let his accidentally murderous friend out of his sight the entire evening and changed history that way.

If Odin didn't have his Swiss-cheese memory and was sent back to when things first went wrong, perhaps he really could fix it. But they couldn't be sure that even with a second chance Odin could get it right and they might be making an even bigger mess for Dr. Beckett to try to clean up. And that wasn't even counting the possibility that he'd succeed and Dr. Beckett would immediately leap and be lost to them again right after they'd – quite possibly – found him again after so long.

"Is that really true, though? Am I stuck here?" Odin asked shrewdly.

"What do you mean?" Donna asked carefully.

"I can understand why you need to hide what is going on here from your people but on Asgard people are a bit more…open-minded about strange occurrences, especially since my son Loki decided to dedicate himself to mischief," Odin said fondly. "If I contact Heimdall, who sees all, and get to the Bifrost then I can return to Asgard today. I would need to wait ten years until my past self is gone and resume my place as king of Asgard."

"You can't do that!" Donna immediately protested.

Sammy Jo contemplated the possibility with dawning horror. He…he just couldn't do that.

"Why not?" Odin asked impatiently. "It's not an ideal situation, I will admit that, but I do not seem to have any other options."

"Even if you can get past the complication of having two of you up in Asgard, you're going to continue looking like Dr. Beckett," Donna pointed out. "You'll still be you but everyone will continue to look at you and see him. And we've never had anyone stay with Dr. Beckett's aura for years before. What if the aura ages? If you're who you say you are-"

"Of course I'm who I say I am!" Odin interrupted, insulted.

"Then you've lived for hundreds if not thousands of years and will likely live for more," Donna continued without missing a beat. "What will happen as Dr. Beckett's aura ages? Will you one day appear to be his ancient and rotting corpse? And what happens when enough time passes that he'd be finished decomposing? Would anybody even be able to see you at all?"

Odin was looking quite horrified at the possibility.

From what Sammy Jo understood of what Al had informed them all of after the evil leaper's former observer had been shot and killed, the person who had been replaced returned looking no worse for the wear seconds after the leaper had died. But they couldn't very well tell Odin that because not only would it not convince him that his plan was a bad one (compared with forever – or something like it – what was a few decades spent looking like a stranger?) but he might even kill Dr. Beckett to switch back faster.

"And all of this is quite unnecessary as Dr. Beckett will leap back really shortly," Donna promised.

"Well if he can leap back shortly then why can't I try my plan?" Odin challenged. "I'm sure that my past self would be more than willing to send Dr. Beckett, or the next hapless soul stuck with his aura, back down to Midgard."

"It won't work like that," Donna said, shaking her head.

"And why not?" Odin demanded.

"Unfortunately, Dr. Beckett will not be able to leap out and you leap back in unless you're physically in the waiting room at the time," Donna explained. "That's the reason that we normally have people who Dr. Beckett has leapt into wait there."

Well, that and the fact that they would just be in the way elsewhere on the project seeing things that they were not meant to see and might even remember when they returned and thus cause all sorts of problems. And letting them actually leave was just out of the question. Look at what happened with the one man who did! The fact that that man was a serial killer already was completely besides the point. He had reportedly not adjusted well to the present and voluntarily returned to what he knew was a hopeless situation back in the fifties for the sake of escaping the present.

"So unless I return to the waiting room and trust that you people know what you're doing and this Dr. Beckett can succeed in navigating the landmine that is my current family dynamic then I will be stuck like this forever," Odin said finally, his tone completely flat.

"That is the situation, yes," Donna said, relieved that he seemed to finally get it.

"What if he fails?" Odin asked quietly.

"Then he leaps anyway," Donna replied. "But he doesn't fail."

Odin nodded. "You have three days to fix the situation or I will handle it my way," he threatened before turning abruptly and leaving the room.

Everything was quiet for a moment.

"Well, that's something, isn't it?" Sammy Jo asked finally.

Donna sighed heavily. "Something? It sounds like Sam has to fix Odin's family issues! How do you fix family issues in three days? Even family issues that aren't as explosive as Thor and Loki's! Assuming that's even who they are!"

"Perhaps he just needs to get them talking," Tina suggested.

Donna shook her head. "We can only hope. Everyone, let's try to get back to work. We have a deadline and if we miss it then we might lose Sam for good."

Everyone did their best to get back to what they had been doing earlier but it was difficult when they all knew that there was nothing they could do to stop Odin if he decided to leave. If bullets even affected him then they still couldn't shoot him because then Dr. Beckett would be trapped. Probably. They had no desire to test that out.

Sammy Jo wasn't sure quite how long it was later that she got a message on the communicator informing her that Al was back and requesting her presence in his office.

When she got there, she found Donna already waiting impatiently.

"I have good news and…well, maybe not so good news, we'll see," Al declared.

"You found Sam?" Donna asked hopefully.

Al nodded and smiled at her. "I found Sam."

"H-how is he? Is he okay?" Donna asked hesitantly.

"He's wonderful," Al promised her. "He was even up to complaining about having to play therapist to Odin's kids."

"Did he do okay?" Sammy Jo asked.

"Oh yeah, piece of cake. He basically just assured Loki that he didn't think he was a monster and let Thor do the rest," Al replied. "I think Sam was sent in because neither of us are really clear on just what happened even now, just that it had something to do with adoption and genocide. Odin likely would have reacted more situationally-appropriate and that was not what Loki needed just then. Maybe he deserved it but that wasn't what Sam was there to fix."

"Then what's the not-so-good news?" Donna asked anxiously.

"I said possibly not-so-good news," Al reminded her. "He was getting a little frustrated with me for not being a Norse myth expert and I started to say that that was your job and-"

"Al!" Donna protested, scandalized.

"I stopped myself before I said your name or that you were his wife!" Al assured her. "But, well, I guess it jogged his memory. You are the Norse myth nut."

"He…remembers me?" Donna couldn't believe it. "He never remembers me."

"He remembered you," Al confirmed. "And he got mad at me again for not telling him. And…then I accidentally reminded him about Sammy Jo." He looked worriedly at her for her reaction.

Sammy Jo shrugged. "I never said you couldn't tell him about me. After all, while I can kind of see Donna's reasoning there's no reason why knowing that he has a daughter out there should affect his ability to do his job."

"What didn't you tell him this leap?" Donna demanded, annoyed.

"I really thought he'd remember," Al defended himself. "He seemed so certain that he would on the leap where we found out."

"He can't control what he can or cannot remember," Donna argued.

"And to be fair to me, this is the first time I got a chance to talk to him in a year," Al pointed out. He smiled again. "He was really happy to see me."

"Of course he would be," Donna said warmly. "You're his best friend. His guardian angel."

"That was Angela," Al corrected absently.

"Angela?" Sammy Jo repeated blankly.

Al shook his head. "Never mind. But if you wondered why I went around saying 'I'm not crazy, I'm Puerto Rican' for a few weeks afterwards despite the fact that I'm not Puerto Rican, I would blame her."

"So was that everything?" Donna asked.

"Almost," Al said solemnly. "Sam leapt but he's not back here and no one is in the waiting room. I think that we've lost him again."

"We don't know that," Donna objected. "It always takes a few days for Sam to leap again, even back before we lost contact."

"I really hope that you're right, Donna," Al told her. "Because otherwise…I don't even know."


	10. Chapter 10

It had been a long week since they had all too briefly reestablished contact with Sam again. By this point, they all knew better than to get their hopes up. Still, after a year of no contact they just hadn't been able to help themselves.

"I wish that the leap had lasted longer," Al said, sighing. "I got to catch up with Sam a little but, really, we didn't have much time to speak. There was only so long he could put off trying to deal with Thor and Loki, after all. Those two were in dire need of an intervention."

"We only had so much time on our side as well," Donna told him. "Odin agreed to give us three days but-"

"Three days? We could have had three days?" Al demanded, groaning. "Maybe he should have been a little less, uh, efficient in his work. And he was complaining that he was no therapist…"

"He did say that, yes," Donna agreed. "But ultimately, we only just managed to talk him down from leaving to go back to Asgard ten years early and staying there."

Al looked shocked. "Did you warn him that he couldn't leap out if he wasn't in the waiting room?"

Sammy Jo nodded. "She did and she even lied about what would happen if Dr. Beckett died and they hadn't switched back, which would eventually happen if Odin wouldn't stay put."

"Still, I don't know if he actually would have been able to wait that long so a quick leap was probably essential in this case," Donna told him.

"It probably would have been difficult if he had stuck around for three days," Al admitted. "I wouldn't have been able to leave him."

"You can't just stay in the imaging chamber for three days," Sammy Jo protested. "Even if you don't care about taking a shower and brought enough food and water in there with you, you'd still need to go to the bathroom and get some sleep."

"I've roughed it before," Al said dismissively. He did have a gift for understatement sometimes. "And you know what happened last time I just left him."

Donna nodded. Al had blamed himself for that for the longest time and she suspected that he still hadn't completely forgiven him despite the fact that he had been freaking out and didn't know what to do and so had wanted to go get some advice. They hadn't expected that once they found him again they'd just lose him so quickly. They couldn't have known.

Donna wasn't quite sure if she'd blamed Al or not for what had happened. She had immediately seen that it wasn't his fault, couldn't have been his fault. He could have stayed the entire time and maybe he would have been able to see more of what was going on but that wouldn't have stopped Sam from leaping again and disappearing. It's not like he could have just told them where he was going or anything; he didn't control that.

She had been feeling a lot of things at the time. Anger, despair, hopelessness, stubbornness…so many warring emotions that she couldn't begin to catalogue all of them. Had blame been one of them? Yes, perhaps it had but only briefly. She knew that Al would rather suffer himself than allow anything to happen to Sam and, if anything, he was taking it harder than she was. She was Sam's wife but Al had been the one to walk away from a ranting and clearly distressed Sam and not be able to find him again.

"Well, I don't," Sammy Jo said after it became clear that nobody was planning on explaining anything. "All I know is that we lost contact with Dr. Beckett, briefly reestablished it on the day that he was born, and then we lost him again."

Donna supposed that it made sense that Al hadn't gone around telling everybody exactly what had happened. It probably wasn't relevant as far as finding Sam went and it was rather demoralizing.

Al cleared his throat. "Right, well…We were working under the assumption that – despite the, what, two trips to times before he was born – that he would still be within his own lifetime. It was taking too long to search through every day of his life and I got a hunch that he would be on his birthday. Gooshie couldn't find him on any of his birthdays until he realized that he hadn't checked his literal date of birth. Well, we were lucky and my hunch paid off so we found him."

Sammy Jo nodded. "So far so good."

"Well, when we did finally locate him and I spoke to him he was…off. I don't know what had happened to him on that leap or if he had just finally had all that he could take of leaping but…It's hard to explain," Al said, shaking his head. "He asked me if he looked all blue and glowed with electrical energy when he leaped and I told him that I had no idea because when he leaped I was usually right there with him and I was sent back to the imaging chamber."

"Oh, he does," Sammy Jo assured him. "Or at least the person in the waiting room does. I have to think that if Dr. Beckett does that then it can't be something that most people can see because if they could then someone somewhere would make a fuss about it and we'd hear conspiracy theories. Not to mention the blue glow when he leaps in…"

Donna looked surprised. "How do you know what people in the waiting room look like when they leap?"

Sammy Jo shrugged. "I've seen it through the door. Not very often but just a handful of times."

"It seems kind of unlikely that you'd just happen to walk past the door when they leap," Al pointed out.

She shrugged again. "I find the whole concept of someone who isn't Dr. Beckett and in their own body but looks just like Dr. Beckett and is forced to wait around for awhile to be fascinating so I kind of walk by there a lot. And it isn't just me, you know. Ask that medical team that had to deal with what's-her-name who was giving birth despite looking decidedly male."

"Well that answers that question then," Al remarked bemusedly. "But that wasn't all. He mentioned that he had seen my dead uncle leap or at least someone who resembled me enough for him to think it was my uncle, had the same kind of arthritis, and the same name. And Sam was not put off at all by the fact that he had been dead before 1953."

"It could happen," Sammy Jo reasoned.

Al rolled his eyes at her. "How, exactly, could it happen? The thirties didn't have anything like Quantum Leap."

"That we know of," Sammy Jo argued.

"In the mid-fifties there was this guy, really eccentric but brilliant and he had a theory about time travel that was very similar to Sam's and may have even been what inspired him…at least in this timeline. It's a long story," Al told them, "but the point is that he had everything right and built his own quantum accelerator in his basement. And he did glow blue if that's what leaping is. He came really close. But ultimately he just didn't have the power and I can't believe they'd have the necessary power in the thirties."

"So what if they didn't?" Sammy Jo asked rhetorically. "If we accept that God or fate or whatever is what keeps leaping Dr. Beckett around and preventing him from being retrieved then why can't one of those forces – the first sounds the most likely – leap someone who didn't get into a quantum leap accelerator? It could happen."

Al remained unconvinced. "It could happen."

"I doubt we're ever going to get any answers on that one," Donna spoke up. "It might have been your uncle, Al, and it might be someone who just coincidentally shared some features and a name with him. I doubt even Sam knows for sure."

"That wasn't all he didn't know," Al murmured. "He claimed that there were people in the bar – there was this bar called 'Al's Place' – and that they all either had the names of people here at the project or looked exactly like people he had met in previous leaps but with different names and who didn't know him. It's impossible."

"Impossible under normal circumstances or at least highly improbable, yes," Donna agreed. "But don't forget what else he said."

Sammy Jo eagerly pounced on that. "What else did he say?"

"There was this bartender, possibly the Al of Al's Place, who I saw through the window laughing and joking with a bunch of the miners, it was a miner town, you see," Al informed her. "He looked pretty ordinary to me, definitely nothing special. Sam thought that he was God or fate or whatever had been leaping him around."

"He thought a bartender was God?" Sammy Jo repeated incredulously.

"I really don't know what to tell you," Al said, spreading his hands out helplessly. "The whole thing…he sounded crazed, he really did. I mentioned my uncle had really bad rheumatoid arthritis and he went into hysterics. He needed help and I…I left him."

"You couldn't have known," Donna said firmly.

"I didn't know and yet it still happened," Al said indifferently. "And there's more. I don't think I ever told you this, Donna, but he had apparently been talking to this mysterious bartender about his leaps or something because the guy told him that he wasn't leaping Sam around but that Sam himself had been."

Donna gasped. "That's impossible!"

"I know," Al agreed. "Of course, assuming that this was just a regular bartender Sam's ramblings probably didn't make much sense to him. He may have even thought that Sam was drunk and told him that he wasn't doing whatever Sam thought he was doing and maybe Sam was doing it. I didn't exactly have a time to get the exact wording down."

"All Sam wants is to come home!" Donna cried out. "Yes, he enjoys helping people and making the world a better place. Yes, if he's managed to make any of our lives better then he'd enjoy that even more."

Al looked a little uncomfortable at that. Was he feeling guilty that Sam very possibly fixed his life in regards to Beth while he was trapped out there and so he had benefited immensely from Sam's ordeal? Probably.

"But you told me how many times he mentioned wanting to go home and have a life and just stop," Donna continued. "And when he came home to me he told me so himself! He might not have been able to remember me while he was leaping and his time leaping might have been blurring together but he said the one thing he never forgot was the desire to finally make it home. And…he promised me that he would be back. No matter what. If he could come back then he would have, a long time ago."

"Not…" Sammy Jo started to say and then trailed off, shaking her head.

"Not what?" Donna demanded.

"It doesn't matter," Sammy Jo said quietly.

"Well I'd like to hear it nonetheless," Donna insisted.

Sammy Jo sighed and looked beseechingly at Al.

"You might as well tell her," he advised. "I don't think she's going to drop it, not when it sounds like you were going to disagree with her."

Sammy Jo winced. "I wasn't exactly going to disagree, really."

"Then what is it?" Donna pressed.

"I was just thinking that if Dr. Beckett was the one who was controlling the leaps then it couldn't have been a conscious thing, right? He and Al must have discussed why it was that he couldn't just go home, right? Especially at the beginning," Sammy Jo said sensibly.

Al nodded. "We talked about it all the time. I never got any indication that Sam believed that he was controlling the leaps."

"And that's because, regardless of what was actually happening, Dr. Beckett never believed that he was the one doing it," Sammy Jo posited. "If he was the one preventing himself from leaping home then it was because deep down his desire to help other people was stronger than his desire to go home."

That rocked Donna for a second. She would never accept that Sam didn't want to come home but if he saw it as a choice to, perhaps selfishly, live his own damn life after so long or continue to save people's lives, what would he choose? She tried to think about it from his perspective. He could go home immediately…or he could spend maybe half a week as someone else and make their life (and perhaps the lives of so many others that the person he helped would help) better forever. How could he justify not doing the one last leap? And then, again, it was just a few days…well, all those just a few days were going to add up eventually, especially if they continued to have time pass hear in 2001 while he was between leaps.

One of the things that she had always loved about Sam was his insistence on doing the right thing, always and without compromise, even when it would really inconvenience or even hurt him to do so. Had that selfless impulse he could never fully ignore been what had been keeping them apart all this time? Would it continue to keep them apart? When would Sam be able to resist making 'just one more' life better? Sacrificing a few days wasn't that much of a price to pay. It was only when it was all added up, when they never did reach the last person, that it began to get problematic.

"Sam never was satisfied to just do what he needed to to leap," Al remarked. "He has to get an aging minor league pitcher back to the big leagues and he helps out the guy's angry friends reach it, too. He needed to make sure that someone got a football scholarship and he set up the guy and his best friend's parents, too. He has to save a small kid from a gruesome death and he brings the family back together. He can never just give a little bit."

"I guess it's not so unlikely after all," Sammy Jo said thoughtfully. "And who knows? Maybe he was only leaping within his own lifetime when we know that he's leapt outside of it on occasion is because that's the limit of what he believed to be possible and so subconsciously he wouldn't allow himself to break that rule. And that would explain why he was able to leap so far into the future no this last one if he now has an awareness of his power to control the leaps."

"But why would he leap to Asgard in 2011?" Al challenged. "He didn't even know that Asgard existed and certainly had no advanced knowledge of the situation when I showed up. He barely knew that they were his sons and named Thor and Loki."

Sammy Jo thought about that for a minute. "If he doesn't really have a target beyond 'somewhere I can help' then perhaps his subconscious keeps taking him to places where he can, even if it's in the future. The fact that he knows that he can control the leaps just means that he's no longer bound to his rather limited lifespan. Of course, there's also the possibility that he's just going to live for at least ten more years and he can travel his entire lifespan, even time that he has yet to live through. We don't have enough data to know for sure."

"Sam didn't remember me before," Donna said slowly. "Say you're right and he can control his leaps and he made the choice to continue leaping. Well, he didn't remember me and he didn't remember Sammy Jo, either."

"Yeah, what about it?" Al asked, confused.

"He remembered you but he knew that you were happy and would be fine without him, even if you missed him terribly," Donna pointed out.

"I am not fine without him," Al said defiantly, albeit untruthfully. He'd been coping just fine this past year despite the guilt and the loss of Sam.

"Well, how was he supposed to make an informed decision if he didn't know what he lost?" Donna asked reasonably. "How much does he know about what he's leaving behind? What does he remember from leap to leap? He remembers leaving you behind and might remember leaving his family that he rarely sees behind but what about anything else? Even if he would have made the exact same decision, he wasn't given the opportunity to."

"And now you think that he knows and might choose to come home," Al realized. He looked sad. "Oh, Donna, I wish it were that simple but you know that he probably won't remember it by the next leap."

"Probably," Donna agreed. "And that's why, it he's ever going to come home, it has to be this leap. If he can remember about me and Sammy Jo and everything and choose to stay out there leaping then what is it going to take to get him to come home?"

Al stilled. "What are you saying, Donna?"

Donna shook her head tiredly. "I don't even know. But he had better come back this time."

"And if he doesn't?" Al asked.

"Then the next time you talk to him you find out if he's really been controlling the leaps and, if he is, if he ever plans on coming home," Donna said, trying very hard to keep her voice steady. "I promised to wait for him and I'll go it, too, but only if he's ever planning on actually returning."

Al sighed heavily. "I'll make sure to talk about it with him. I'll need to remind him about you again and so I hope he doesn't have anybody he needs to romance that leap. But you're right. I wish you weren't but you are. If Sam is refusing to come home then you deserve to know and you deserve somebody who is willing to be in the same year as you. But he's not controlling the leaps. He wouldn't do that to you."

"Not if he remembered me," Donna corrected.

Al just shook his head and slowly walked out.

"Do you…do you think that he would really do that?" Sammy Jo asked uncertainly.

"What, Al?" Donna asked distractedly. "Of course. If he said he'll talk to Sam about it then he'll talk to Sam about it."

Sammy Jo shook her head. "No, I mean about Dr. Beckett being able to return home for…well, at least awhile and choosing not to?"

Donna spread her hands out helplessly. "Honestly, I don't know. We used to joke that he was a saint, you know. And what could be more saint-like then sacrificing everything to spend the rest of your life helping people and making the world a better place non-stop?"

"I…really don't think that's very saint-like at all, actually," Sammy Jo said slowly.

"You don't?" Donna asked, surprised. "How do you figure?"

"You hear about people who were wonderful public figures and helped so many people but when it came to their own family left much to be desired," Sammy Jo explained. "No one's perfect, of course, not even saints but I just think they need to be at a higher standard than that. Is it so 'selfless' to just abandon your family like that all in the service of helping others? I don't think so."

"It's not selfless to stop helping people and come right home again, either," Donna countered.

Sammy Jo shrugged. "So 'selfless' has nothing to do with it. I've always been suspicious of that word anyway. It seems to me that even people who help others because they like helping people are getting something out of it. We don't need to be selfless here. And if Dr. Beckett could really control his leaps and was really planning on staying out there then I think that the least he could do was come back here and get his affairs in order and say his goodbyes before going back out there. The way he left things just wasn't enough. There was no closure for anybody except, I guess, for Dr. Beckett himself. How's that for selfless?"

Donna tried to imagine finding out that Sam had come back only to have him tell her that he needed to walk away again, perhaps insist on divorcing her because he was never going to be a part of her life again. She couldn't. It just hurt too much. Was it worse than never seeing him again and knowing that maybe he had chosen that? She couldn't say.

"Maybe it's too hard for him," Donna suggested softly. "Maybe he knows that if he comes back he'll never be able to leave again."

"He left again once before," Sammy Jo argued.

Donna shook her head. "That was different. Al had literally minutes to live and he's saved Sam's life something like twenty-three times. And he's probably saved it more since then. There was no time to think, only to react. He also knew the consequences very well if he didn't leap back in. This way…well this way he'd just have to walk away from everything he has to go on helping strangers."

"And we don't want that to happen," Sammy Jo pointed out. "What's the problem?"

"The problem is," Donna said, almost not believing that she was even calling it a problem, "that Sam would know full well the kind of temptation to stay he'd face and would probably prefer not to expose himself to that if he's trying to stay away and live a selfless life of helping people."

Sammy Jo nodded sarcastically. " 'Selfless.' I see it now."

"I don't want Sam to stay out there forever, you know I don't," Donna told her earnestly. "It's just that if he does and he spends the rest of forever helping people…I can't hate him for that, Sammy Jo. I can't even judge him."

"It's okay," Sammy Jo assured her. "I can judge him enough for the both of us. For the three of us if Al doesn't think he's up for it, either."

"He won't be," Donna replied. "But like I said, I can't bring myself to believe that he can control it."

"Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow," Sammy Jo agreed. "Of course not, why would you? But as time continues to pass, even if Al never finds Dr. Beckett again or Dr. Beckett never admits to being able to come home and choosing not to, you'll have to wonder."

"I really wish you wouldn't say these things," Donna said, closing her eyes tightly.

"I'm sorry," Sammy Jo said and she really did look contrite. "It's just…I don't want you to get hurt any more than you have to so I want you to be aware of what might happen."

"I-" Donna started to say when the door burst open.

Verbena beamed at them. "It's Dr. Beckett."

"Sam?" Donna asked, her heart in her throat. "We've found him?"

Verbena's grin widened. "In a way."

"Don't just leave us in suspense," Sammy Jo ordered.

"He's back!" Verbena exclaimed, looking fit to burst. "I'm supposed to tell everyone but I thought I'd start with you two. He's with the Admiral in the waiting room. He wants to see you."

"Back?" Donna repeated dizzily. That word meant something, she knew, something good but she just couldn't…

"He leaped home," Verbena said happily. "After all this time, he's back."

Oh. So that was what it meant.

"I've got to go tell everyone else," Verbena said before rushing away.

Donna couldn't breathe. Sam was back. She'd only gotten the news once before back when he was stuck in the imaging chamber and that news had come via the post office and Gooshie. And now, after they had just been talking about…What if that were why? What if he had remembered about them and decided that the only responsible thing to do was to say goodbye? She didn't know if she could face him.

Sammy Jo was knelling in front of her. "Come on, Donna. We've got to go. I need to meet Dr. Beckett, remember? And you…you're in for the reunion you've always wanted."

"But you said-" Donna began numbly.

Sammy Jo shook her head impatiently. "Forget what I said. _Your husband came home_."

\----

Later, after they had all gotten their chance to welcome him back and Sam tolerantly endured a party he clearly didn't want to be at, the two of them finally got a moment alone.

They had driven far enough from the base that they couldn't see it anymore and they were unlikely to be bothered by late-night traffic. Then they'd gotten out and sat on the hood of the car, just staring at the stars. She had often started up at the stars like this and wondered where Sam was, when he was. She'd wondered, too, if they were star-crossed lovers. But they couldn't be, could they? Star-crossed lovers didn't get happy endings.

"You're back," Donna said again, still unable to believe it. She knew that when she woke up in the morning she'd be surprised by this turn of events all over again and the next morning, too. She wondered how many mornings it would take before she just woke up expecting her husband to be there. She wondered if she'd get a chance to find out.

Sam chuckled and kissed her neck. "I'm back, Donna."

Donna's breath hitched. "Is it…? I mean…"

Sam pulled back and placed his hand on her knee, looking intently at her. "Is it what?"

"You came back to me once before," Donna reminded him.

Sam nodded. "I remember. And I promised that I would return again and I did."

"Is it for good this time?" Donna asked him, hoping she didn't sound half as insecure as she felt. It didn't even matter if she did or not, though. Sam had always been too damn good at reading her.

"Well, this time no one else is trapped in my place and slowly being murdered by jerks who can't take rejection," Sam said matter-of-factly.

"No, that's true," Donna agreed. "But there are still a lot of people out there that need help."

Sam winced. "I know."

"So…" Donna prompted.

"I've done my part, I think," Sam told her. "I've done more than that. For now, I'm ready to just stay at home and try to see what's left of the life I had six years ago. I'm glad to see that you're still there."

"How could I not be?" Donna asked rhetorically. For all that it had been the hardest thing she had ever had to do, waiting in mostly ignorance for Sam to finally return to her, she knew that as long as there was a chance he'd be back she could never really walk away. "But what do you mean 'for now'?"

Another wince. "Donna, I can't promise you that I'm never going to want to go out there again and help more people. I wish I could but I can't predict the future and I do like helping people."

Donna looked down and Sam reached out a hand and tilted her head back up to look at him.

"But what I can promise you is that I won't just make a unilateral decision without telling you first," he vowed. "If I go again, it's not going to take you by surprise. And I don't think that day is going to come anytime soon."

Donna swallowed hard and nodded. "Okay." It was enough. It had to be enough. And he wasn't just here to say goodbye. She could face down his helping people think later and who knew? She might even win. She certainly wouldn't be alone in her battle not to lose Sam again.

"I still can't believe that you were so accepting of Sammy Jo," Sam said again, shaking his head in amazement. "I always knew you were amazing, Donna, but that's just so much more than I ever thought possible. Accepting her existence is one thing but you two seemed pretty close."

Donna practically glowed as she soaked up the praise. It hadn't been an easy road to get there but now she could say with certainty that it had been absolutely worth it.

"Well, of course I did, Sam," she replied sweetly. "Just what do you take me for, anyway?"


End file.
